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

Dr. Jared Diamond, PhD, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, physiologist, evolutionary biologist and Professor at UCLA. We discuss the surprising and often chance events that shaped human history and leadership in politics, religion, business and athletics. As one of the most influential public-facing scholars of the last 100 years, Dr. Diamond also shares his advice on how to pursue a career and life that reflects your unique interests and that makes a positive contribution to the world. He also shares the tools he uses to keep his mind and body vigorous. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Rorra: https://rorra.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Jared Diamond (00:02:51) Leadership, Prophets; Hitler, WWII (00:09:17) Hitler, Leadership, Deception (00:11:45) Unlikely Leader: Harry Truman (00:13:45) Sponsors: Rorra & Eight Sleep (00:16:28) Leaders, Introspection, Charisma; Individuals, History Patterns (00:22:35) Leaders & Addressing Mistakes, Forgiveness (00:25:36) Religious Leaders, Jesus & Leadership, Organizers (00:30:42) Leader Partnerships, Science, Religion (00:35:18) Jim Jones, Effective Cult Leaders; Followers (00:39:53) Sponsor: AG1 (00:41:06) Leaders & Clinging to Power (00:44:29) Learning Languages (00:49:59) Taxonomy, Lists & Names, Studying Birds (00:56:41) Curiosity, New Guinea Birds, Success & Support Across Different Careers (01:04:55) Travel, Intellectual Explorer (01:07:44) Birds, Vision & Sound, Ecology; Bird Song, Monkeys (01:14:50) Sponsor: Function (01:16:27) Academic Leadership; Time & His Remaining Projects (01:25:54) Humanity Risks, Population Bomb (01:30:46) Physical Activity; Sports Leaders (01:38:08) Coaching Philosophy, John Wooden; Business Leaders, Yvon Chouinard (01:44:31) Great Leadership; Advice for Others (01:51:22) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People regularly look for personal generalizations, personality generalizations about leaders. Perhaps the commonest generalization is that leaders have to be charismatic. Nonsense. Some leaders are charismatic. Stalin, Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, totally uncharismatic. There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader, of which charisma is one. And any question that you or anybody else would ask about, how can we generalize about leaders' personality? There are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations, because there are different ways to be an effective leader.

• 0:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Jared Diamond. Dr. Jared Diamond is a professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles. He's done research in biology, anthropology, and frankly, in so many areas that there really isn't an appropriate title for him. He's also a renowned author of books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He has also been awarded the National Medal of Science and a MacArthur Genius Award. Today, we discuss topics related to Jared's most recent book, which is about leaders and leadership. It is entitled, "Profits, Profits, Coaches, and Kings." We discuss political leaders, religious leaders,

• 1:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  leaders in business, and in sports. Today, you're going to hear a lot of myths dispelled, including the common myth that charisma is requisite for successful leadership. And we discuss a lot of incredible biology. For instance, why observing birds? Yes, birds. Because of their reliance on sight and sound, makes them one of the best windows into understanding human behavior and human nature. We also discuss Jared himself, because, as you'll soon see, he is an incredible and very unusual human being. We discuss his obsessive curiosity that's been there since childhood, and how it's migrated from topic to topic, book to book, paper to paper, and what his process is for taking hard questions into the laboratory and going out into the wild, literally, to observe things in their natural state and then bring back all of that knowledge

• 2:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  in a form that is unlike any other scientist or writer. So what follows is a discussion with an absolute luminary of science and public education. And it's one that I'm certain will inform, enchant, and inspire you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond. Dr. Jared Diamond, welcome.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to be with you.

• 2:55Andrew D. 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 all of your books, and mainly focus on your book, which is "Profits," phonetically the same, but profits as in making profits, and profits as in who become prophets and what they are. Coaches and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? I think now more than ever, people are thinking about modern leadership and themes of past in leadership. First, I would like to know, what is a prophet? P-R-O-P-H-E-T.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  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 prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings. I don't care about whether they prophesy the future. It was simply my word for religious leaders.

• 4:05Andrew D. 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. And we can go into the middle of the continuum if you want as well. But your book starts off talking about Hitler, which for the vast majority of people alive is considered one of the darkest leaders ever. Tell us about Hitler and what you learned about him that perhaps can inform how we think about leadership more generally.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  I was born in 1937, which meant that I grew up in World War II. Growing up in the United States, I was not bombed, I was not orphaned, but every day of my life that I can remember was formed by the war. My first memory, the first data thing that I can remember was the first photo that the US Army released of dead American soldiers. It was a famous cover of Life magazine. Two American soldiers, dead face down on Bunangona Beach in New Guinea. So I grew up in the shadow of Hitler. My family is from Eastern Europe, Jewish from Eastern Europe. The last in my family, of course, disappeared in the Holocaust. I married into a Polish family. My wife's parents came to the US in 1948.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  My wife's mother had survived Auschwitz. Various members of my wife's family did not survive. And so my life and Marie's life had been formed under the shadow of Hitler. On top of that, then, there were leaders, non-political leaders, who shaped my life, mostly for the good. There was a chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department. I left a rubber hose pump, water pump, running all night to dry out radioactive isotope. The pump broke. It flooded my lab. It flooded the lab below my lab. That was not a good choice of lab to flood. It was the lab of Lord Adrian,

• 6:03Speaker 00

  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 in. I thought I was going to be expelled. Instead, he said, you know, that was sloppy. Don't do that again. And that was the... So there was a leader who could have ended my career, but didn't. There are other leaders who've done decisively good things for my career. There are few people who failed to do anything, but there have not been leaders who did me... 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

• 6:48Speaker 00

  and would Marie's family still be alive?

• 6:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  How close were we to there not being an adult Hitler?

• 6:55Speaker 00

  There were two famous near endings of Hitler's life. My book begins... The first paragraph of my book is about a car accident in 1930, three years before Hitler became chancellor, when his limousine, driven by a chauffeur, was driving into an intersection in Germany. Hitler was in the passenger seat, the right-hand seat, and a big truck came into the intersection at right angles with Hitler's sedan. Both Hitler's chauffeur and the truck driver either braked or accelerated ultimately.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  And the truck, Hitler's car, face on, pushed up against the curve and was about to ride up over the car, crushing Hitler. And it came to a stop just before that. Hitler was injured, but he was not killed. If he had died in 1930, would there have been World War II and would there have been a Holocaust? And then the other famous almost was that in 1944, next to the last year of the war, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who became disillusioned, attempted to kill Hitler.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  He brought a small suitcase with a bomb into the conference room at Wolfslehr. He sat down next to Hitler, put the suitcase, which he had primed the bomb. He put the suitcase just under Hitler's foot, and...

• 8:41Speaker 00

  The bomb went off, but just before the bomb went off, Hitler leaned forward. The result was that four other people in the room got killed. Hitler's eardrum was blown out. Hitler was seriously wounded, but he was not killed. But if Hitler had not leaned forward, that was 1944. Would various members of my wife's family have survived? So, so those are reasons how, how close it came to Hitler not becoming Chancellor and how close it came to World War II ending in 1944. World War II in Europe ending in 1944.

• 9:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Was there anyone else that could have accomplished what Hitler accomplished?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Historians argue about that. This illustrates the, the difficulties in figuring out whether leaders make a difference. The traditional method of historians and biographers is to write a biography. There are many people who've written biographies of Hitler. Most biographers of Hitler conclude that Hitler was unique in several respects. He was the most charismatic orator, unfortunately, of the 20th century. He was anti-Semitic. There were plenty of anti-Semites in Europe, not just in Germany, but in Poland. But Hitler, all those other anti-Semites killed Jews one by one.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Hitler was the only one who got the idea of doing it on an industrial scale. Without Hitler, it probably would, would not have been a Holocaust. He was also brilliant at deceiving people, deceiving famously Neville Chamberlain at Munich. But he also deceived German politicians. He deceived German business leaders. He deceived German generals. He deceived his fellow Nazis. He was just brilliant at deceiving people. So those are the arguments for thinking that he made, he made a difference, that without World, without Hitler, there might not have been a World War II and there would not have been, been Holocaust.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Most historians tend to believe that leaders don't make a difference. But in the case of Hitler, most historians would argue that Hitler did make a difference. The famous British historian, A.J. P. Taylor, wrote a biography of Hitler using the same facts. And with the same facts, A.J. P. Taylor came to the conclusion that Hitler was a normal German politician, pursuing the goals of other German politicians, which is true, but that there wouldn't have been any difference if Hitler had not been a leader. So those are the arguments about Hitler. But that illustrates the weakness of the traditional biographic method.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  One's limited by the facts, but different people come to different conclusions with the same facts. That's why my book uses a different method, the method of natural experiments.

• 11:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Who in your mind is the most unlikely leader that became a spectacularly successful leader, either toward positive or destructive ends?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  There are many, many candidates for that. One candidate, the first, having been born in 1937, I grew up under Roosevelt, but the first American president in, in whom I became interested, because I was by then 80, Harry Truman. The most unlikely significant American president. He was selected as Roosevelt's third or fourth vice president for trivial political reasons. He, he was a senator from Missouri, undistinguished. He had, he had become senator through dishonored shenanigans. He was so insignificant that Roosevelt never met with him once Truman became vice president.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  And when Roosevelt died, Truman was totally, Truman didn't know about the atomic bomb. And yet, the first decision that he had to make was whether to drop the atomic bombs. At the time, Truman was widely despised. I remember my own view of Truman. He, I and others looked down on Truman. But in retrospect, we realize that Truman was courageous and 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.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  And so when Truman stepped down, he was widely loathed. But in retrospect, gradually he's become appreciated as not equal to Roosevelt and Lincoln, but the second tier, a courageous American president who took decisions and didn't care that he was going to be loathed because of the decision, his decisions.

• 13:44Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 14:29Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 15:12Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 15:56Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 16:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  to build big things, be leaders, be entrepreneurs. We have to be careful about painting with too broad a brush, but in researching different leaders, both dark and light, is there a theme of powerful leaders being able to just step into the next decision without too much thought about the past or how they're going to be perceived? That's one form of introspection. I realize there are others, but is there a correlation there?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  I would say no, and, and this illustrates a broad, broad point. People regularly look for personal generalizations, personality generalizations about leaders. Perhaps the communist generation, the 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, is one. And any question that you or anybody else would ask about, how can we generalize about leaders' personality? There are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations, because

• 17:51Speaker 00

  there are different ways to be a effective leader.

• 17:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm getting the sense that in your understanding of leaders and leadership, based on what you just said, that it's this weird confluence of circumstances, who's not available to lead better, perhaps charisma or lack of charisma, a weird constellation of things that give rise to history and what we're experiencing now. And so for me, and perhaps I'm wrong about this, that contrasts a bit with my understanding of you based on your prior books, which is that you're trying to find thematic regularities. You're trying to put structure on things that, at the face of them, are very complex, like how did we get here?

• 18:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  How did cultures evolve, et cetera, and, and on and on. So in this exploration of leadership, how do you go from being able to explain each circumstance to some taxonomy that allows you to be satisfied? And I'm going to set up a parallel with something that we're going to look at later, which is bird watching. I mean, every bird is different, but every bird belongs to a particular category and has particular features. And in many ways, I'm thinking about leaders and leadership the same way. What is satisfying to you? What level of understanding and consistency of ideas is satisfying?

• 19:19Speaker 00

  There are generalizations that I came to in writing, writing about leaders, but I would say just, just as background, people often ask me, Jared, your book about leaders now seems to be the opposite of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared, your book Guns, Germs, and Steel was about big patterns. There was nothing about individuals. Instead, it was about domestication and the shapes of continents. Does that mean that you've changed your mind and you now recognize a role of individuals? And my answer to that is, is no. Guns, Germs, and Steel is about patterns of history on the continents.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Over the last 10,000 years, and over the last 10,000 years on whole continents, I can't think of any individual who's made a difference. There was no individual who was responsible for the Fertile Crescent jump-starting civilization. The Fertile Crescent jump-started civilization. Why? Because the Fertile Crescent was where the most productive wild plants, peas, wheat, barley, the most productive wild animal, cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse, lived. And so in Guns, Germs, Steel, there's nothing at all about individuals. Whereas my book about leadership is about what people have done during my lifetime, usually on local scales. And so it is about individuals, whereas Guns, Germs, Steel was not at all about.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  I haven't changed my mind. It's that I'm looking at completely different sorts of questions now in prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings compared to Guns, Germs, Steel.

• 20:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it a leap to say that prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings is a, in some ways, is a autobiography of where you're, of the things that impacted your life along the way?

• 21:13Speaker 00

  In motivation, yes. In content, no. In motivation, yes, the role of Hitler in my family's life and my wife's life, but the content of the book is all divorced from me. In the introduction, I think I do mention that Sir Brian Matthews saved, as a leader of the Cambridge Physiology Department, saved my career in physiology. But then, once I launch into politics, and once I launch into the business world, and once I launch into the sports world and religion, no, it's all stuff.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  I haven't contributed to any of those four areas. Now, in the epilogue of the book, I do ask, what are the areas, other areas, that are waiting for exploration by the method of natural experiments? And I'm in science, which I am a scientist, art and music, I am a musician, military history, I'm very interested in military history, social unrest. I'm hoping that in the future, people will apply these questions of leadership to things that involve me personally, particularly music and science, but that's for the future.

• 22:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  You've mentioned this story about flooding the laboratory with, I should point out, I heard you say radioactive isotope water. What is your takeaway from that particular professor's response? And has it made you more forgiving of other people's mistakes?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  I've not been one to jump on other people for their mistakes. I've made plenty of mistakes. I've had very close calls myself. I've done things that could have ended my career on the spot, such as that, there were other things that could have ended my career on the spot. So I'm not inclined to blame other people for their mistakes. I recall a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, mentioned that Oppenheimer, he committed theft, and he could easily have been fired, and his career might have been ended. But the theft was overlooked, and so he went on to develop his career.

• 23:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's interesting how, when we are very low on a hierarchical ladder, like in academia in its traditional days, anyway, that people hold tremendous power, obviously, to impact us in whether we move forward or not. But it's always reassuring when something like the forgiveness of this professor, if people can hear that, because I think a lot of people associate powerful leadership with, here I'm generalizing again, with a sort of a lack of tolerance for imperfection, lack of tolerance for things that could threaten the whole department in this case.

• 24:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's a very sweet story, on the one hand, but I imagine it didn't happen a second time. There's also that, right?

• 24:25Speaker 00

  For 36 years, I was professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School, doing laboratory experiments. And so I had graduate students and post-docs. And quite a few of the graduate students and post-docs 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. Couple of others of my students had close calls, but again, I'm reminded how close I

• 25:08Speaker 00

  came myself to being, having my career ended. And people forgave me, and my career developed very well.

• 25:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I would say so.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Since I was forgiven, it owes me to forgive my students.

• 25:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love it. And I'm sure many people appreciate that. It's a very different picture of academia than I think most people get. So thank you for that. Religious leaders. Who in your mind stood out as important enough to feature prominently in the book?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  In the book, I have two chapters on religious leaders. The first chapter looks at three religious leaders in the 19th century United States, because we got lots of detailed information about them. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, and Lee, the founder of Shakers, Jim Jones, the founder of Jonestown. So we have a lot of information about them. The second chapter on religion looks at Jesus. We have minimal information about Jesus.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  We have no contemporary information whatsoever about him. The first information that we have about him is the letters of St. Paul and the Gospel according to St. Mark, both of which follow his death by about 20 years. So there's no contemporary information about him. With Jesus, did Jesus make a difference? Well, if you read the New Testament, talks about names, six other messias. 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. Couple of them were killed by the Romans. John the Baptist had his head cut off.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  So if Jesus had been with the same properties in the Sudan, we wouldn't know about Jesus. If Jesus had been a religious leader in Western Europe 100 B.C., we wouldn't know about him. He was the right place and right time.

• 28:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  He definitely has the highest H-index of any religious leader.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  The right place and the right time. And I believe that Christianity is today the world religion with the largest number of adherents.

• 28:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know you try not to generalize, but is there anything specific about Jesus, the person that we do know with almost certainty, or with certainty, that spoke to his effectiveness? Or was it, you said right place, right time, but that seems necessary but not sufficient?

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Right. There were other people at the right place and the right time. There were those six other prophets mentioned in the New Testament. And there were the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why was world religion founded by Jesus and not by the leader of the Essenes? Well, there were a couple of things. One, Jesus's message and personal qualities. He had a universal message for all people. It was not just a message for the Essenes, and it was not just a message for Jews. Yes, Jesus was Jewish, but his message was not addressed to just the Jews.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  It was a universal message of those religious leaders of the Roman Empire at that time. That was a big thing in his favor. And another thing in his favor was that a religion needs not only a charismatic founder, but it also needs an organizer. In some cases, the organizer and charismatic founder are the same person. Mohammed was a great organizer and also charismatic. The Mahdi of the Sudan was a brilliant organizer and brilliant general, also a brilliant religious leader. Jesus died too early. He was not the organizer, was St. Paul.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  St. Paul was a great organizer, just as with the Mormon religion. Joseph Smith was the charismatic founder of the Mormon religion. Even in his lifetime, he had his weaknesses as an organizer, and he was then lynched. The organizer was Brigham Young, who was a great organizer. So your question, why Jesus? Universal message, and he had the good fortune that he was then followed by a great organizer, St. Paul. And he was in the right place, the Western Roman Empire, at the perfect time.

• 30:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  And Columbus, obviously, was able to propagate his ideas far, as you pointed out, with the desire to still avoid generalizations. What the picture I'm getting is that you need a leader, you need an organizer. Sometimes the leader is the organizer, but oftentimes it sounds like there's someone else or other people who can help organize the message. We see this in science quite often, especially in the biological sciences, pairs of, well, your advisor, Hodgkin Huxley, won the Nobel Prize. They're famous for describing the biophysics of the action potential. Hubel Wiesel won the Nobel Prize. It's very common

• 31:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  that there's this pairing, and having known David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel a bit, Torsten's still alive. There's often a personality complementarity there, too. One tends to be a little bit more outspoken, one a little bit more, you know, Watson and Crick. I'm sure there are just as many examples that don't fit. But in thinking about leaders, not just religious leaders, can we make any kind of generalization about pairings? Two very complementary people that are especially effective in getting escape velocity on their on their leadership, their message?

• 31:59Speaker 00

  I don't think so. In the case of religion, it's not just pairings, but it's often triplets, namely, to launch a religion, you need charismatic founder, you need an organizer. But generally, always when you found a new religion, there is pushback from existing religions, and often that pushback is violent, so that often new religions have had to defend themselves, have had to have generals. For example, the Mahdi Mohammed was an outstanding

• 32:41Speaker 00

  general, as well as organizer and charismatic. The Mahdi of the Sudan, who established an empire in East Africa towards the end of the 19th century, great general, he led hundreds or thousands of Sudanese tribes with just sticks to wipe out a British Egyptian army of 7,000 with machine guns. A great general, great organizer, charismatic. But in other spheres, in science, there are scientists who are large-scale organizers. My thesis

• 33:20Speaker 00

  was Alan Hodgkin. Alan Hodgkin did, great scientist, he did not organize 50 people into a lab group. Alan Hodgkin, his strategy was to have one PhD student at a time. While I was his PhD student for three years, he did not have another PhD student. He did become Master of Trinity College, and he was an effective Master of Trinity College. But there are scientists who are also outstanding organizers. Gerald Adelman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on figuring out how antibodies operate. Gerald Adelman had, I believe, something

• 33:57Speaker 00

  like 50 postdocs. And a friend of mine made a discovery that so-called Bens-Jones proteins in the kidney, a discovery that was crucial to figuring out how antibodies operate. But my friend operated alone. He did not have 50 postdocs. And so when my friend made the tactical mistake of giving a lecture about his discovery of Bens-Jones proteins before he had published, Gerald Adelman was in the audience, and I'm told, then immediately told his lab, switch everything. And his 50 postdocs went in there, and they figured

• 34:41Speaker 00

  out how antibodies operate. Gerald Adelman got the Nobel Prize, and my friend did not get the Nobel Prize. But Gerald Adelman was a very effective organizer and fundraiser.

• 34:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  And big personality.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. I met him on two occasions. Yes, he was a big personality.

• 34:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  And he ventured into neuroscience after immunology. And, yeah, big ideas, big lab, big ideas. So there are just as many exceptions to the statements I'm making. I'm realizing as there are things that meet it. I was surprised that you mentioned Jim Jones. And most people, perhaps, have heard of the Jonestown massacre. The top contour of that in my mind is a bunch of people left the country to follow this cult leader and drank poison, and it was mass suicide. When I hear about cults and I hear about cult leaders, for some

• 35:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  reason, I default to thinking more about how impressionable the cult followers were, rather than how persuasive the cult leader was. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians was, you know, in my mind, burned down the the structure, killed everybody inside. And when I hear Koresh's lectures, they have no impact in persuading me of anything, except that he was nuts. When you think about an effective cult leader, I think most people, perhaps, default to that they're preying on the vulnerable. But is there a world where those effective cult leaders could have done something else in the context of regular

• 36:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  society and been effective leaders? Or is it, there's something about the pairing, the dysfunctional pairing of the person prone to be a cult follower and the cult leader?

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Interesting question. A leader needs personal characteristics that will enable her or him to lead. They may be charisma, they may be being able to terrify people, they may be able to persuade people. On the one hand, there's the leader, and on the other hand, there are the followers. Not everybody is a follower. There are some people who are prone prone to follow charismatic people. And there are other people, lots of people, who are not going to follow even most charismatic people. Hitler. They were the Germans who followed Hitler, were persuaded by Hitler, but the Nazis never got a majority

• 37:13Speaker 00

  in an election. The majority of Germans were not persuaded by Hitler. Jim Jones of Jonestown, notorious for founding a colony in Guyana, and the colony ended in the largest mass suicide in American history. 931 people drank punch poisoned with cyanide. But Jim Jones, he can't be written off as a crazy. He led the desegregation of Indianapolis. He attracted

• 37:54Speaker 00

  people by the noble ideals of the church he founded in Indianapolis. The people who followed him were not a random assortment of people. They were predominantly poor people, predominantly older people. A lot of them were African Americans. They tended not to be highly educated people. The People's Temple, as it was called, required the charismatic leader. This is really an interesting point that you raised, but it also required people who were disposed to be followers.

• 38:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  I didn't realize he led the desegregation of Indianapolis.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  If he had died before he moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco, if he had died in his first couple of years in San Francisco, he was appointed one of the Housing Commissioners for San Francisco. He attracted many idealistic people in San Francisco, but he was gradually getting more and more crazy. But this illustrates the point that you make, which is an interesting point, that one has to inquire not just about leaders, but also about followers. Who is disposed to follow? In the case of the Nazis, yes, it was clear that there were Germans

• 39:18Speaker 00

  who were disposed to follow to follow Hitler. In the case of Winston Churchill, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  My parents voted three times for Roosevelt and once they voted against Roosevelt. My parents and other Roosevelt were not crazy, sick, sick people. And Winston Churchill, the people who voted for Winston Churchill were not, were not crazy, crazy, sick, sick people. In that case, one cannot look to the pathology of the strange qualities of their, their followers as one can in the case of Jim Jones.

• 39:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients: creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB, and zinc carnecine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health, calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown, and zinc carnecine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them, and therefore I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula.

• 40:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly 14 years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product, and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. I realize it's possible to divide leaders, or people, or animals, or anything into different categories depending on where one decides to slice the line, but can anything

• 41:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  informative be said about powerful leaders who declare that they are not at the top of the hierarchy, that they obey God, or a particular God, versus that they are at the, at the top of the pyramid? We'll leave Jesus out of this because that's an obvious one. But in the case of Jim Jones, you said he had a church. Did he still talk about the existence of God? Did he try to leverage God to make people convinced that he was humble to God? Or is, or was he saying that he was really the apex of, of power and understanding? And I suppose we could apply this to just pretty much anyone we've discussed or anyone else.

• 42:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is this an informative dividing line?

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Jim Jones certainly did not, did not deny God and did not, did not claim to be, be superior to God, is another. Are there traits shared by leaders? And I mentioned that, that there are different ways to be an effective leader: charisma,

• 42:25Speaker 00

  in, I think it was 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. And I asked myself, what generalizations can we reach about these 22 leaders?

• 42:51Speaker 00

  The 22, the obvious, obvious candidate, you can argue about them, but Stalin, Enwar Sadat, Mussolini, Hitler, et cetera, et cetera. I asked myself, are there any qualities shared by all of these leaders? And the surprise for me was that of these 22 leaders, there were only two who stepped down voluntarily. Nelson Mandela, the founding post-apartheid leader of, of South Africa. He was, I think, in his eighties, and he retired voluntarily as prime minister. Then Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, served as prime minister, might

• 43:35Speaker 00

  be as long as 30, might be as long as 40 years, but he stepped down voluntarily. But of the other 20, those were the only two out of 22 who stepped down voluntarily. All other major leaders were either assassinated, Enwar Sadat, or committed suicide, Hitler, or they were voted out of office, Winston Churchill, or they were thrown out by a coup, which means that in, in politics, once, once you've become a powerful leader and you've

• 44:14Speaker 00

  come to the conclusion that you are an effective, powerful leader, you are very unlikely to step down voluntarily. Only two out of 22 did it. So that's a generalization that I had not anticipated.

• 44:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I suppose it's a lifestyle hit, too.

• 44:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Nobody wants to go backwards in terms of their comforts. But I am surprised that some people have the vigor to continue to occupy these very high-demand spots despite aging and fatiguing. I mean, you clearly don't slow, but the, you know, but we'll talk about the fact that you're teaching yourself Italian now, is that right? Are you teaching yourself a new language? Did I hear that correctly?

• 44:59Speaker 00

  I learned Italian. Italian was my, the last of my 13 languages. I learned Italian.

• 45:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just 13?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  When I, when I was 61 years old. I read Italian every day. All my leisure reading is in Italian. I don't do leisure reading in English. I read Italian every day, and once a week I have a two-hour Italian conversation with my Italian professor, who's a professor at USC.

• 45:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  What inspired you to learn 13 languages? Is it fun for you, or do you, and or do you enjoy the challenge as part of the enticement of learning another language?

• 45:32Speaker 00

  My mother was a talented linguist. I just loved learning languages. And my school required us to, to study Latin for five, five years. I loved it. We had the alternative of studying electives, either Greek or biology. I figured I'm going to be doing biology for the rest of my life. I will now take, so I, I spent three years learning Greek. I can still recite the beginning of the maine aditha, ah, paleido, ah, kala.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Then in college, I learned German just before, my mother helped me with that, just before us entering college. In college, this was the time of Sputnik, so I learned Russian, I learned Spanish. And then my first summer after college, I spent the summer in Finland. The Finnish language is a non-indo-European. It's a really difficult language. When I went to Finland, I did not have a Finnish grammar, but I was hitchhiking around in Finland. And at that time in Finland, summer of 1959, very few Finns spoke English. In order to hitchhike, I had to start learning Finnish.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  And I ended up in a national park in northern Finland, where I, I hiked into a hut that was being looked after by four Finnish soldiers. The four Finnish soldiers didn't speak any language except Finnish. And I'm with them for several days. They teach me Finnish by demonstrating things. Cup, they picked up a cup, and the word, Finnish word for cup was kupi. And then Finnish, instead of having prepositions, it has postpositions, cases. So when you want to say, the cup is on the table, kupi, pu dal la. When you want to say, I'm putting the cup onto the table, pu dal la se. When you take the cup off, pu dal la se.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  So these four Finnish soldiers, they demonstrated for me by putting cups onto and off. I just loved it. And I seriously considered dropping out of science.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  I met my, after I'd been to Finland, I met my, my parents in Paris. They came to Europe, saw them for the first time in a year. And I was seriously considering dropping out of science and becoming a simultaneous translator. I was going to go to Switzerland to become a translator. Fortunately, my, my father, he was, he gently said, maybe it's, maybe it's a bit early to drop, 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. But I, I loved learning Finnish. And then when I went to New Guinea, New Guinea has a thousand languages.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  The first New Guinea people that I worked with were the Foray tribe, famous for kuru, laughing sickness, first prion disease. And at that time, there was a New Guinea trade line, his New Guinea trade line, called Talkvision. So I was able to communicate with Talkvision, but I just loved learning Foray from, from, from a couple of Forays. I remember asking my Foray informant, I was trying to figure out the word for, for we. I'd already learned the word for I, nage.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  So I asked my, my Foray informant in Talkvision, I, nage. So we, all the same one, mipala. And he said, then he gave me a word for, for we. And then I replied, oh, we? He said, no, nage, tasige. It turns out that, that Foray has a dual. English is singular and plural, I and we. But

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Among European, Slovenian and ancient Greek have a dual, namely, separate pronouns for two of us and three of us. So, for example, if I'm talking to the two of us, we do this. But if there were a third person here, it would be a different pronoun. In four, it would be cosi. All in ways, I just loved learning languages. I've always loved languages.

• 49:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  It seems you love the puzzle of it. You love the application of it, given that, once you learn Italian, you still have these conversations in Italian for a couple of hours a week. Once again, I'm struck by how, despite the tremendous variation in the different languages, for instance, that there's something about, I'm not trying to play psychologist here, but there's something about your mind where it seems you're very comfortable with immense amount of informational diversity within a category, like language or leaders. Most people come in and they try and simplify to clarify. But you have this, it seems your mind goes to, let's find the widest range of variation possible.

• 50:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  And from that, we're going to extract some deeper understanding. It's, this may occur to you, but it's a highly unusual way of doing things. I mean, in biology, we have lumpers and splitters, as we say. I teach neuroanatomy, so you can lump or you can split. You can say brain, or we can start dividing, and you can divide everything right down to the subdivisions of the mitochondria, if you want, right? So you have to pick your, your level of analysis. But we tend to put frameworks, nomenclatures, and try and name genes in ways that we can think about other genes that are similar. Your mind works in a very different way. And what I'd like to know is, has it always been that way? Have you looked at the taxonomy of, of stuff in the world and said, that's crazy, why do they organize it that way?

• 51:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe we should look at it through the, the most detailed lens, and from that, extract clarity?

• 51:32Speaker 00

  I've been that way only since age three. My mother, who was a teacher and loved teaching. Mum taught me to read when I was three years old. And so, so I began keeping a notebook. I've still got my three-year-old notebook. In my notebook, I made lists. I made lists of the names of rivers, the names of animals, the names of animals of the Rocky Mountains, the names of birds of Europe. I was a lister. This is embarrassing, but I listed the numbers of streetcars on the Boston streetcar system. I had long lists of the numbers. I love making lists. And I've got a lot of mileage in, in biology out of making lists.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  After my PhD, I was membrane biologist. And among my contributions to membrane biology, I did the largest study ever carried out of the permeability of biological membrane to uncharged molecules, non-electrolytes. I and my, my first postdoctoral student, we measured the permeability of rabbit gallbladder to 210 non-electrolytes. They're all organic chemicals, and there's lots of detail there. There were branched non-electrolytes, there were non-branched non-electrolytes, and there were ones with oxygen groups, and there were ones with, with sulfur groups. So there's lots of detail.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  I loved the project with those 200 non-electrolytes. Then when I went to New Guinea to start to study birds, I've been studying New Guinea birds since, since 1964. New Guinea has about 600 bird species. I've encountered and gotten to know most of them. When I'm falling asleep at night, often I'll recite to myself lists of New Guinea birds. Sometimes I'll recite them by their foreign names, the Mabesena, the Pascaquiam, the Kenmamitoto, the Iswana Daba. Sometimes I'll recite them by their, by their Latin names, Seracornus papuensis, Seracornus perspicolatus, Seracornus noyus. I just love making lists.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  But one, one of my teachers, one of my influential teachers, Ernst Meyer, the great evolutionary biologist, Ernst Meyer 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, 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, of northern Melanesia. What generalizations are there about the mountain bird? Are there, 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.

• 54:28Andrew D. 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, if you see a bird in the woods and somebody says, that's like a whatever, whatever thrush. He said, knowing the name doesn't help you understand it. But I'll say, based on spending a lot of time thinking about the names of and the connectivity of different brain structures, often there's a, a way of naming things in a field that actually tells you a lot about the functionality. Like in neuroscience, for instance, we, the first name in retinogeniculate, it tells you what the origin structure and the recipient structure are. So like, the names actually matter.

• 55:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  They tell you a lot more than just, this is different than that. So as you made these lists, and as you recite these lists, when you're falling asleep, are you also able to call to mind the functional distinctions between these? Is that simply the way that you batch information? Or is it that the lists and the names are, have their own unique value that's independent from that?

• 55:33Speaker 00

  The names are the, the anchor for a lot of information. When I recite at night, Seracornus noyus. Seracornus noyus, the large, large scrub wren. What about it? Well, it's the larger of two birds in an albatross sequence. It's the larger of two coexisting species, which are very similar, so similar that the Pascaquiam and the Mabesena, I couldn't tell them apart until New Guineans explained to me the differences in, in their behavior. So there's a lot of information that's associated with the name. In addition, the name itself has, Seracornus, means that that bird belongs to the genus Seracornus.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  And in the genus Seracornus, there's also Seracornus virgatus, which is the low elevation equivalent of Seracornus noyus. But there's also Seracornus perspicolatus, which is the small-bodied scrub wren that shares the same albatross ranges, noyus. So there's information that goes along with the name.

• 56:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, in the world of science, you and I both know there are people who pick one thing, and they just drill there. Sometimes for an entire career, or for five or 10 years at a time. And then there are people that try and throw their arms around enormous batches of information. Clearly, you're in the latter category. And so, once again, I'll ask, was this always your tendency? You wanted to know all the information?

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Basically, yes. Meaning, I've always been interested in lots of things. I was fortunate to go to a secondary school that gave me options to, to study lots of things. My secondary, although I expected to go into science, my secondary school had a great history teacher, better, better than all the history teachers I had, had at Harvard College. Wonderful Latin, Latin Greek teacher. Then, once I got my PhD in physiology in Cambridge, England, and returned to the United States, having gotten my PhD in salt and water transport by the gallbladder. In retrospect, I didn't know what I was doing at the time. But in retrospect, I realized that I was now understanding, with horror, that I was expected to devote myself

• 57:48Speaker 00

  to the gallbladder for the rest of my life. But that just went against everything that I had done from age three onwards. And so, I shopped around for another career. I seriously considered making another career in pre-Columbian ceramics. I seriously considered becoming a conductor of an orchestra. I didn't have the insights into pre-Columbian ceramics. To be a conductor, you have to be able to ignore time lags, and I could ignore time lags. But I, I had been a, become a bird watcher at age seven, and...

• 58:27Speaker 00

  When I came back to Boston after my getting my PhD, in my first summer, I and a college classmate, the college classmate was a great bird watcher. We spent the summer in Peru. What do you do in Peru? We climb mountains, we watch birds. The next summer, we went together to New Guinea. Like, New Guinea's the wildest place in the world. But New Guinea also has the most wonderful birds. And so I developed a second career in birds. And then I developed a third career in history and geography. So I've had three careers. My career in laboratory physiology, I eventually closed down in the year 2002. Why?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Because when my, when our twin sons, my wife and I have twin sons, they were born in 1987. When our twin sons were born, I realized the future of Max and Joshua is not going to depend upon gallbladders, it's going to depend upon history and geography. And so gradually, I began spending more of my time in history and geography. I was less interested in gallbladders. Finally, with great difficulty, I got UCLA to transfer me from being professor of gallbladder physiology in the medical school to being professor of geography in the college. I've still kept up the two careers in history and geography. At the same time as I was writing my book on leaders, at the same time, I've also been

• 59:56Speaker 00

  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 Wandaman Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. Next year, I want to do a paper on the birds of the Waning Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. And because I'm 89 years old, I have to figure, what do I, my remaining time is finite, what am I going to do with my remaining time? One of the things that I want to do with my remaining time is to synthesize my work on New Guinea birds by looking at bird distribution on the 10 isolated mountain ranges of New Guinea. What generalizations can I recognize about the birds that are good colonists?

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  So that's what I want to do for the remaining 10 years of my life.

• 1:00:42Andrew D. 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, you know, scientific exploration, much less writing books about them as well. And did you at some point give yourself permission to move fields? It's not common, as we know in science, for people to do that. And if people do it, they tend to do it somewhat cryptically and then, or end gradually. And maybe this is also, not to pry into your personal life, but it's one thing to decide, you know, I'm, my twins are arriving and, you know, maybe I'll switch fields. But there's a spouse there who's probably thinking, uh, do you have tenure? How are we going to pay the bills?

• 1:01:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I imagine there was likely support, or maybe you're just very defiant and you just follow your curiosity.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  There were the career issues and there were the issues of interest. The issues of interest were that ever since I was three years old, I've been interested in lots of stuff. And I realize in retrospect that among my life crises, one of my life crises was after I got my PhD, realizing with horror that I was expected to do one thing for the rest of my life, but that was not me. And it took some effort to carve out a second career in birds. I had a postdoctoral fellowship. Most postdoctoral fellowships bind you to do one thing. I was in the biophysics lab of the Harvard Medical School.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  But I was fortunate that my postdoctoral fellowship was with a Harvard society called the Society of Fellows. I was a junior fellow at Harvard. And as a junior fellow, I had freedom. I could, I could tell the boss of my biophysics laboratory, I'm going to New Guinea for three months this summer to study New Guinea birds. I didn't ask his permission, I just said, I'm doing it. Now, he could have fired me and he could have said, well, if you want to do that, get out of the biophysics lab. But I was doing good work in biophysics. And so he was, he was willing to tolerate my going off to New Guinea for three, for three months.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Then when I moved to UCLA, the crucial piece of my negotiation with moving to UCLA, where I was offered a professorship, associate professorship in the physiology department. The dean of UCLA was the longest-serving medical school dean in the United, Sher Melikoff, wonderful person. He was offering me a job in the physio. I told Sher, yes, but I'm interested in New Guinea birds and you got to understand that I intend to, the last several years, I've spent three, three months every summer working on New Guinea birds and I want to continue my work on New Guinea birds.

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  And if I accept your position, will you tolerate my continuing to work on New Guinea birds? Most medical school deans would have said, get the hell out of here. Sher Melikoff 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, so he tolerated it and he made it possible for me. I'm then fortunate that I had a dean who permitted it. As for, as for my, my wife, Marie, Marie had no problems whatsoever with it. When I met Marie, I was already working in New Guinea.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  In fact, the development of our relationship, a crucial, a crucial issue in our relationship was that Jared was going off to New Guinea for every three months. And Marie knew what happened in New Guinea. I got nearly killed in New Guinea repeatedly. And so Marie had to be willing to tolerate that. By the time that our kids were born, I had a very secure position in medical school. I was going to New Guinea. When our kids were born, it was not that Marie told me, Jared, don't go there for three months. It was that I realized, Jared, you're not going to go there for three months anymore. And so when the kids were born, I reduced my time in New Guinea to one month at a time. And my last New Guinea trip was 2019.

• 1:04:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it raises a very interesting feature of adventurous living, much less researching and, and living, you know, immersed in a different culture, a different ecosystem, which is that it can be hard on the body to go places that you're not familiar with, eating food you're not familiar with. Most people think, oh, what are you talking about? You know, you can get a cheeseburger from McDonald's anywhere in the world now. And perhaps that's true, but have you always been willing to put your physical comfort on the line in order to learn? I mean, learning languages is hard.

• 1:05:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Putting yourself into a jungle environment where there's all sorts of diseases, where there's political and social unrest, like there are a lot of variables when you get out there. And so then you become an intellectual explorer, but truly in the wild. Was that something that was fun, a necessary evil? Where's that landed with you?

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  To work in New Guinea, it's a, it's a necessary evil. It's not, until I went to New Guinea, I, when I was in Peru, the previous, the year before I went to New Guinea, my friend and I went to Peru, spent a summer in Peru. We did mountain climbing. We did a first ascent of a 17,000 foot peak. Being at high altitudes, going straight up from sea level to 10,000 feet, and then three days later going to 16, is miserable. So, yes, I experienced physical misery in Peru. In New Guinea, to do anything in New Guinea, there's lots of physical, physical memory, misery.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  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, in New Guinea, being in New Guinea is physically miserable most of, most of the time. Occasionally, like, like maybe once in three months, I can sit down.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  At campsite and look out and at another 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 Mabesane and the Pasquikhiabi.

• 1:07:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's talk about birds. The only other two birders I know from science are Jim Watson, who started off as a birder, ornithologist of some sort anyway, decided to solve the, co-solve the structure of DNA. So he went a different way. And then the late, also late Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark as a, I think a two Nobel winner, maybe one, anyway, smart guy who was obsessed with birds and bird taxonomy and bird watching. It's interesting that all three of you have, it seems, a kind of obsession with going

• 1:08:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  after these big questions, like entire societies, leadership, the structure of DNA, Gell-Mann, you know, you know, elementary particles and all the rest. But birds, of which I know some, certainly not as much as you, there's this tremendous, tremendous diversity. And unless one is really into birding, it's easy from the outside to say, like, yeah, okay, so you've got the black cap chickadee and you've got this one and you've got that one. And what information, what enrichment is to be gleaned from observing them? I'm not being disparaging of it. I myself love birds. In fact, I had the weird and unique opportunity to talk birds with Murray many years ago

• 1:09:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  at a physics meeting. But my knowledge of birds is like very, very superficial compared to yours, obviously. So what is it about knowing all these nomenclatures and details about how they move and seeing them in the wild that, what does it inform you about and what does it celebrate in you?

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  What does it inform us about, inform me about? Birds inform, inform ornithologists about everything. Birds, birds are the, they're the easiest of all animals to observe and to understand. Birds operate by the same senses that you and I do. Birds operate by sight and by sound. We humans operate by sight and sound, whereas mammals operate especially by smell. One can't rat watch. Yes, you can watch antelopes, but you don't go around watching rats. If you want to understand rats, you have to have a good sense of smell, you catch them in trap. But birds you can watch.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  And so most of what we know about ecology and evolutionary biology and biogeography and behavior has been learned first on birds and has been learned in most detail about birds. And then that knowledge we can learn, apply to, to other animals. So the things that, 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,

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  the distribution of plants and animals around the world began especially with the distribution of birds and then mammals, mammals and other things. The animals easiest to observe are, are birds. So, so when you say, what can we learn about birds? And honest answer, we can learn everything about birds and everything in the biological world is easier to learn from birds than about other animals.

• 1:11:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Perfectly acceptable answer. The, many birds sing, some speak. I don't know if you're interested in the language evolution from birds, but there's a name, Peter Marler.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. He was at Davis when, when I was a graduate student. One of the most interesting observations, in my opinion, that he made was that the same species of bird would have a different song if they were raised at the Marin Headlands versus, by the, naturally raised by their bird parents at the Marin Headlands versus elsewhere. And that there was some innate relationship to the species, like you could swap the young and they could learn the other location song, but that they would always learn their location song best. And I feel like if ever there was a set of scientific findings that kind of converges a number of your interests in language and location and migration, it's those Peter Marler studies. If you met, what did you guys talk about?

• 1:12:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  And what do you think is perhaps interesting about bird song and bird language that can tell us about us?

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Everything, everything, bird song. It's a communication. What are birds trying to communicate? So, so birds are singing. Why are they singing? What information are they conveying in the birds, bird song? It's been assumed that bird songs of males are territorial to stake out territories. But in recent years, we've learned that there's really detailed information in bird calls. For example, birds that gather in flocks like chickadees and tsett mice, if they see a hawk, there's a call note, a small, a simple call note.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  When, when the birds see the hawk, they'll give that call note and birds then 200 feet away will hear that call note and they'll know that the hawk is there before the hawk can fly those 200 feet. So there's a lot of information in bird songs. That then has inspired similar studies in, especially in monkeys. There was a husband, wife, couples, Saifar and Chaney, who were at UCLA and moved to Pennsylvania. They did wonderful studies on vervet monkeys. Vervet monkeys make grunts. And Saifar and Chaney thought, some of these grunts sound a little different. And so they started recording the grunts and playing the grunts.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  And they noticed some grunts, the monkeys looked up and some grunts, the monkeys looked down and some grunts, the monkeys propped themselves up. And they, they realized that, that the different grunts functioned as words. There's a grunt that means eagle. And when a monkey, vervet monkey comes up with a grunt for eagle, the monkeys look up. And there's another grunt that means python. When vervets hear python, they look down at the grass. There's another grunt that means leopard. When they hear leopard, they scramble up a tree.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  So this is example of the information conveyed by sounds first in birds and then in monkeys.

• 1:14:49Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:15:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it did. In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked. My blood lipids are now back exactly where I want them. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is just so important for health. I mean, how else are you going to know what's going on under the hood? And while I've been doing blood work for years, it used to be time consuming, complicated, and expensive. In fact, I used to spend thousands of dollars per year trying to get this kind of data and the data, frankly, were not all that good. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. A Function membership is only a dollar a day, $365 a year. And if you think about the information it provides and the health challenges it helps you avoid and the proactive things that it can do for you to enhance your health, I truly look at it as a savings.

• 1:16:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code HUBERMAN for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. The layers of sophistication in different animals, I think, is, is really underappreciated. I mean, even for somebody like me who's a biologist, you know, it's always pleasantly surprising how sophisticated these other species are. Even if this stuff is hardwired, it's, it's wild. In fairness to your earlier example where somebody forgave you for a mistake in the laboratory and you passed on, or you said you were already rather forgiving, propagated

• 1:16:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  that forward, when one of your graduate students or postdocs would walk in and say, listen, I realize we work on X, but I want to go work on this other thing, were you tolerant, amused? Because the survival of a laboratory and a research program also depends on people hopping on board the main thrust of questions. I'm just curious, I'm not holding your feet to the fire, I'm just wondering how much adventurousness you tolerated in your scientific offspring?

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  It had to be a project that interested me because I worked hard to find the funds. And I could take only two or three students at a time. A student would be with me for three or four years. Big investment on my part. I would make that investment only if it made sense for me. On only one occasion, did a student tell me that he wanted to have his own project. There was a wonderful Argentinian student who one day came to me and said he had asked around in the physiology department and he had learned, he'd been told that for postdocs,

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  it was the norm in the department, he alleged, was that the postdoc would spend half his time working on a project of his advisor and half the time working on his own project. Now, that was untrue, but he had found another postdoc of whom that was true. And he was an interesting guy. And I was taken aback. Okay, you can do your own. And he did a project of his own as well as the project with me. But that's the only time that I've had a student do a project that did not interest me. Otherwise, the projects have always been projects that interested both me and the student.

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  And that's good for the student, because for the student to get my full attention and to learn from me, the student can learn from me if it's something that I know about. The student cannot learn from me if it's something that I don't know anything about.

• 1:19:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's clear, because you've told us and your career demonstrates this, that you have had and maintain a lot of interests, deep interests and deep curiosity, almost a compulsion to follow them and solve certain things about those for yourself. Before we started recording today, we were having a quick conversation about one's preference or lack of preference for certain pets, for certain things in the world, and we don't have to go into it. It wasn't contentious. But what I was so struck by, positively struck by, is how clear you were, I think we had met about 20 seconds prior, about the fact that some pets, some things, some topics,

• 1:20:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  to you are, in your life, are a diversion, like you're just not interested in them. And I think that fits beautifully with being interested in many other things. So this is a somewhat strange question I'm about to ask, but do you think about time? Like, how much time do I have in life to do this? And did you always think that way? As somebody who just turned 51, I think about this more and more. But the beautiful thing about an academic career is you sort of know, okay, I've got four to six years for this thesis. Boom. And then there is an opportunity to pivot slightly or a lot. But life is somewhat different, right?

• 1:20:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it's clear to me that you were saying, that's all fine and good for other people, but I don't want to be bothered, invest my life energy in those things. Clear, period, end of story. And it's very refreshing, in fact, because I, and it runs counter current to this idea that you're interested in everything. You're not interested in everything, if I may. You're very interested in a lot of things, and that provides a really nice razor to separate out all the things that you're just not going to be bothered by. Has this always been a feature of you?

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely not. And to give you a preview of coming events of what's ahead of you, when I turned 80, 80 was not a shock to me. 81 was more of a shock, because 81 meant that I was firmly embedded in the 80s. But even though I knew perfectly well the numbers for life expectancy, life expectancy of an American man at birth is something like 78. Life expectancy of an American man who's reached the age of 70, this is not so widely known. When you've reached the age of 70, your life expectancy is not 78. Your life expectancy is 93, because a lot of the risk is behind you. And I knew that perfectly well.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  But when I was 81 years old, I wasn't counting what I could do. But in the last couple of years, since I'm now 89, I'm very conscious of time left and what I want to do in the time left. Couple of specific things that I want to do in the time left are to synthesize my understanding. New Guinea has 10 outlying mountain ranges. I did the first descents and the first ornithological explorations of several of them, and 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.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  And I want to do a synthesis, looking at those 10 mountain ranges, to understand what is it that makes a species a good colonist? Why are some bird species on all 10 mountain ranges and other birds are only one mountain range? I've got that unique data set, and I want to write that up while I'm still alive. Another thing that I've been thinking for quite a while, a musical, I particularly loved the music of Bach. I sang in Boston's Hennel and Hyden Society. I sang in Cambridge's, Cambridge England's musical society. Benjamin Britten came and did the premiere of the Cantata Academica when I was singing in the Cambridge chorus.

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  So I've been interested, and I've sung in the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whom I particularly love. He wrote 210 church cantatas. I sang in about 20 of them. And I've been telling myself, sooner I want to get to know all of those cantatas. A year ago, August, the time has come. The time ahead of me is finite. Better start on the cantatas now. And so I start on the cantatas, the rate about one a week. Last night, I re-listened to Cantata 61 and 62. Next will come Cantata 63. At the rate I'm going, it will take me maybe three or four years to get to know all of the Bach cantatas, but that's something that I would like to do.

• 1:24:08Speaker 00

  But I'm very conscious now of the amount of time left. And I've had that consciousness only in the past few years.

• 1:24:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Were there any things that you used to do out of obligation, 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?

• 1:24:32Speaker 00

  My first thought is, is no. By and large, I've done the things that I've enjoyed doing. Now, of course, there are things, there are things that are not pleasure, that have to be done in life.

• 1:24:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 1:24:46Speaker 00

  I spend lots of time, probably I spend at least a month, maybe two months of the year, on our income tax returns, which are complicated. I have a pathological tolerance for manipulating numbers, so I don't object to doing income taxes much as most other people would do it. Income tax has to be done and takes a lot of my time. What else do I do? My father washed the dishes. I wash the dishes together with my wife. Marie does the gardening. I have no interest in gardening. Marie does the gardening. Marie does the shopping.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  I excuse myself by, and Marie knows that I spend the equivalent, 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, and I'd rather spend the time doing birds, but it's not something that I greatly object to.

• 1:25:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I would never ask someone to come here and speak for somebody else, but I was gratified to learn that you were close friends with my colleague Paul Ehrlich. And his wife Sandra Kana is still on the faculty at Stanford. Paul wrote, of course, The Population Bomb. Paul and Sandra wrote the book Jaws, with, I think it had a foreword by you and maybe an introduction from Bob Sopolsky about mouth breathing being detrimental to facial structure development and as well as health, perhaps. And they called it an epidemic. There's some interest in nasal breathing and apnea and so forth.

• 1:26:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Paul was a delightful person, as you know. You knew him much better than I did. But he got some things right, and some people would argue he got certain things wrong. Like, The Population Bomb, my understanding was that it argued that we're going to be badly overpopulated by the time we reach now, and that that was dangerous. Some people would argue that birth rates are going down, the replacement problem is more of an issue. But was he correct about some of the issues with population growth and environmental impact? This isn't an area that I have any expertise, but what do you think are some of the places where he was oh so correct? Because he was an incredibly smart and in many ways prescient on some of these topics.

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  He was certainly correct that the biggest threats that humans face today, of course, they include the nuclear risk of exterminating ourselves. I'd say the three biggest risks we face are the nuclear risk, the consequences of inequality in our globalized world. Now, anybody, anywhere is affected by anybody, anywhere else, and that's an invitation to the world. Trade towers, in a globalized world, it's dangerous to have inequality. And then the third, the third risk is, of course, the risk of running out of resources, destroying our resources, which we are doing at a rapid rate.

• 1:28:08Speaker 00

  Why are we in the process of overexploiting our resources? Because the world population has increased. There are now, what, 9 billion people? 10,000 years ago, there were probably 1 million people, 1 million people on Earth, and now we've got 9 billion. But what counts is not just the number of people, but the consumption rate per person. Consumption rate per person in the first world has gone up. And the result is that we are depleting fisheries, but like 4 billion of the world's people depend upon fish, seafood for their protein. We're depleting the world's forests. We're depleting the world's topsoil.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  Paul and his wife Anne, the book The Population Bomb, called attention to the danger of population growth.

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  And one can now add to population growth multiplied by consumption per person. Paul predicted big dangers within the next few decades. He predicted widespread starvation. If you look at his Wikipedia entry. So here's one of the world's great modern scientists. And his the goddamn Wikipedia. His Wikipedia entry instead harps on his book, 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?

• 1:29:45Speaker 00

  Are they starving to death? No, they're not starving to death quickly, but they've got short lifespans and they're having miserable lifespans because a small fraction of the world's people have first world lifestyle, even in the United States. The polarization in the United States between the people who have enough and the people who don't have enough is growing. So to blame Paul Ehrlich for getting it wrong, no, he got it, got it right, but he got it right in a broader sense than the idiots who attack him are willing to admit.

• 1:30:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Happy to hear you say this. Long been a fan of his work and him, and I agree. And Jaws is a wonderful book, as, and I think The Population Bomb still has great, there's real value in reading it, even if the specific statements, as he's pointed out, held up differently, it's still a really important work. We talked about political leaders. We talked about religious leaders and a bit about cults. Sports. Are you into sports?

• 1:30:56Speaker 00

  Am I into sport? I, well, I work out.

• 1:31:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, you look very healthy. Is that an important part of your intellectual rigor as well?

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  I've always been physically active. I began weightlifting in college. I ran for years. The day that my wife was, was in labor, was about to deliver our twins, I was, I was going running and I was so excited that she was about to deliver twins that, that instead of putting my lunch and lunch in the refrigerator and my shoes on the floor, I put my running shoes in the refrigerator, my lunch on the floor. So I still work out several days a week. Being physically active is a, it's a big part of my, my life. I get satisfaction out of it.

• 1:31:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I think for somebody to do physical exercise nowadays with the intention of, building and preserving both their mind and body is, is pretty common. But when you were in college, if I extrapolate, that wasn't really talked about. In fact, the separation of intellectual and, and athletic endeavors was kind of a theme. It was like, people played sports, right? But working out was, was sort of the stuff of, of like military jocks and bodybuilders and running less so, right? But I find that all the scientists that I know that have, have had very long, successful

• 1:32:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  careers and are still going strong, all are very physically active and have been for a long time. All of them. And the ones who aren't are mostly dead, if I'm honest.

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  The great Harvard organic chemist, Woodward, A. 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.

• 1:32:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the lab, presumably.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  I think in bed.

• 1:32:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, well, better than in one's office or, or lab. So along those lines, athletics and sports. Which sport, are you into spectator sports? And what led you to explore leaders in sport?

• 1:33:14Speaker 00

  I explored leaders in sports for the same reason that, that business school professors do a lot of their, much of their research on sports outcomes. In fact, I would say that, that much or maybe even most of the research on sports outcomes is done by business school professors. The reason being that, that business school professors are of course interested in business outcomes, but business outcomes, they're, they're hard to measure. CEOs tend to be secretive. Businesses may not publish their results or they publish them every five years so that

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  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 analyzing the business world are often developed in sports and they're, they're debugged in sports. For example, in the business world, one of the main questions is, is of course, how

• 1:34:41Speaker 00

  much, how much of business success is due to the CEO? This is a loudly, CEOs say, I'm responsible with the success and therefore you ought to pay me billions of dollars because my, my company, our company makes a hundred billion dollars, but because I'm responsible for that hundred billion dollar profit, you can pay me $10 billion. Is that true? It's complicated to figure out. There are a couple of methods. One involves doing an Anova analysis of variance. Analysis of variance applied to sports shows that roughly 15 to 30% of variance in sports

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  success is due to the coach, about another 30% is due to players, and about another 30% is due to the institutions. That's in sports. In the business world, it turns out that, that similarly, CEOs account for about 30% of Anova and the individual company accounts for another proctore and gamble, very well run company, been well, well run for 150 years. Another 30% is due to the industry. Perfume companies and computer companies and teenage t-shirt companies tend to be very profitable.

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  Whereas departments of order and power tend to be unprofitable. Why? Because they're tightly regulated by, by governments. So Anova gets applied to the sports world and also to the business world. But in addition, coaches frequently get fired if they have a losing season. And CEOs get fired if the company has a poor year, low returns. So if you fire a CEO because of a losing season, the next year, usually the new CEO has a better season. Why?

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  Because 70% of the variance in sports outcome is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO. If you're throwing, throwing dice and you throw a dice and you get a one, and so you say to the person through the dice, you're a lousy dice thrower. You got one. I'm firing you. For statistical reasons, the chances of five out of six, that the next dice thrower will do better than one could be because there's two, three, four, five, six. In the sports world, when you fire a coach, usually the new coach has a better record. Why? Because of all the random factors.

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  My university, UCLA, our athletic department is now $150 million in debt. Why? Because we, we fired all of our basketball coaches since John Wooden.

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  And when we fire them, we have to buy out their contract. So buy out their contract, five million, 10 million, 15 million dollars. Simply when you fire a CEO, the next CEO is likely to do better for then random reasons. As with Dice, that illustrates why business school professors have gotten lots of their insights by analyzing sports.

• 1:38:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  How important is a coach's philosophy? And by extension, a CEO's philosophy on like, why we are doing this? We hear so much about this, like, that the why behind things is so important, but is that actually the case?

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  Yes, but rarely. So, so John Wooden is usually regarded as the greatest coach in the history of American sports and in any sport. Under John Wooden, UCLA basketball team won, what, nine national championships, including seven in a row. No other college has won more than two national championships in a row. Why was John Wooden so successful? There were many reasons that he was successful. He got his players in peak physical condition, although his players might be five inches shorter than Duke's players. He got his players to jump higher than the Duke players. He was a master of detail. He cared about what socks that they wore, because the socks that they wore affected,

• 1:39:08Speaker 00

  you know, how they jumped and how they played. He paid a lot of attention to getting his players to train, not just in groups of five, which they'll be on the court, but in groups of seven, so that he could substitute. But perhaps the most important thing about John Wooden was, was that for him, basketball was not a sport. Basketball was a philosophy of life. And John Wooden's great players, Bill Walton and Alcindor, they said, Coach Wooden, I've 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, basketball was a model for life. That's unusual among coaches.

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  Bill Belichick, I've never heard anyone say that, say that Bill Belichick is a model for life. And what Bobby Knight, nobody says that Bobby Knight was a model, model for philosophy of life. So why is it that John Wooden was so successful? Partly, he was a master of detail, but also because he regarded basketball as a form of living life. And that's something that you can't fake. Yeah, you can fake and you can learn how to, how to train your players to jump higher, but you can't fake a philosophy of life as John Wooden did.

• 1:40:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is there an analog inside of the, well, nowadays, it seems it's tech CEOs and entrepreneurs? I mean, we have these looming larger-than-life figures that, having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know, it was Hewlett and Packard when I was a kid, and then Steve Jobs, obviously, and Bill Gates in Seattle. And then now we have Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman. Dario at Anthropic is sort of quickly emerging as another one of these big figures, but I probably missed a few out there. But those are the big, whether they like it or not, celebrity technologists that people look at and to for like, where, where, where is humanity going?

• 1:41:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Politics aside, Steve Jobs would clearly had a philosophy of creating beautiful things and design and technology being fused in a way that was, you know, highly accessible, that objects had friendliness to them or something, even if it was an apple. So it seemed there was something philosophical, even slightly mystical there. How do you look at these technology leaders? And what do you see? What do you think?

• 1:41:43Speaker 00

  Bill Gates, I've met him, I have had several lengthy conversations, and I like him. Good experience, my conversation with him. There are people who've met him under other circumstances, who have different views of him. Elon Musk, I met once. Jeff Bezos.

• 1:41:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, yeah. So forgive me, I should have mentioned Bezos.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jeff Bezos, Bezos, I met, met once. Of the leaders in the, in the business world, I don't know that many of them. One that I admire as a person is Shunard of Patagonia. For him, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life. He emphasized having his staff have, have time off. He emphasized Patagonia being sustainable. He had the opportunity to acquire more cotton, produce more, more product. No, he chose not to acquire more cotton, because he didn't want, he didn't want to overdevelop cotton agriculture.

• 1:42:44Speaker 00

  He is or was a fool person, not, not just, not just a leading business person. He did the first ascent of the most difficult face, face in Yosemite. He was a top-ranked mountaineer. I know him. I wrote the preface for his autobiography. He has a philosophy of life. Do any other of the big names, does Jeff Bezos have a philosophy of life? Does Mark Zuckerberg have a philosophy of life? I'm not aware of these big names having a philosophy of life that goes beyond their business.

• 1:43:26Speaker 00

  Now, Steve Jobs certainly had a philosophy of life as regards business. When he came back to Apple, after he'd been fired the first time, and Apple was in difficulty, he was brought back the second time, his philosophy was that Apple, he reduced, instead of Apple producing 100 products, he said, we should produce four products. And the product should look nice, and they should be attractive, and they should be easy, easy to handle. They should not be like the remote for my wife's and my TV to watch the World Soccer Cup. Our remote has, what, 47 buttons?

• 1:44:09Speaker 00

  And we had to call up our sons each time to, to tell us how to operate the remote. So Steve Jobs's devices don't have 47, but he, he had a philosophy certainly of products. I don't know whether he had a larger philosophy of, of life, as John Wooden certainly did.

• 1:44:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  So we talked about political leaders, religious leaders, sports. You said there's a fourth category that you cover in your book.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  So we got political leaders, business leaders, sports leaders, and religious. Those are the four categories, the four categories.

• 1:44:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And business and sport seem to kind of interdigitate a bit, right? It sounds like.

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  The connection between business studies and sports studies has been especially tight, but it's also the case that the, the business school professors who've studied sports have also studied success in politics. So perhaps the best single paper that I know on developing new methods for, for studying the success of, of leaders, looks at leaders in politics, looks at leaders in business and leaders in, but it also looks at leaders in politics.

• 1:45:34Speaker 00

  And the conclusions that it comes to are that prime ministers make more of a difference than do governors of states, and governors make more of a difference than do mayors. Why? Because prime ministers have more power. Also, dictators make more of a difference than do democratic leaders. Democratic leaders in wartime make more of a difference than do democratic leaders in peacetime, because wartime democratic leaders are given more power. So the business school professors have also applied their methods to, to politics as well.

• 1:46:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Many people are interested in many things, and they have a genuine excitement, and they reverberate on the idea of pursuing music, or singing, or an instrument, or a topic of study, or a sport.

• 1:46:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  What would you tell those people? Because we've all heard the just do it mantra, and that's great, but again, I'm not a psychologist, but it seems that within you, there is, or perhaps has always been this almost compulsion to go in a certain direction, but you're, you're structured in how you go about that. You didn't just try to do everything at once, and you, you clearly succeeded in each of these domains. I'm sure there were challenges along the way, but what, what would you, if anything, would you like to pass along to people of any age?

• 1:47:04Speaker 00

  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 Lofjoy, now unfortunately dead, Tom told me when, when he was a teenager, Tom asked his father, Daddy, what should I do for a career? And his father said, do something that you're good at. Do something that you enjoy. Do something that makes a difference in the world. What advice would I give people? Perhaps the main advice, because it's what most people do not do, is

• 1:47:40Speaker 00

  Make sure that you do something that you enjoy. And if people tell you, no, you got to do this, this, this. Tell them to go to hell. Literally. So many people say, you got to, you got to live your life this way. You got to iron your shirts. When I was a graduate, I didn't iron my shirts. Now, someone who irons my shirts. But, but as far as I'm concerned, I, if anyone tells me, Jared, spend your time ironing your shirts. Go to hell. There, there are other things that I want to do with my time. And whether my, this shirt is ironed, but whether my shirts are ironed or not, doesn't make much difference to life. What does make a difference is, am I doing something that I enjoy? Am I doing something that I'm good at? Yep.

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  Am I doing something that's, that's good for the world? Yeah, I've spent a lot of time designing national, the national park system of Indonesia and Guinea, designing the principles for national parks in general. I've written, I've written books about the big risks facing the world. So I've devoted a lot of my life to trying to convince people to, to live better lives and not to, not to mess up the world. I've done things that I enjoy. I've done things that I've good at. There were some things that I wanted to do, but I discovered that I was not, not, I would have loved to be a conductor of orchestras, but to conduct an orchestra. You see the players out there and you got to give the downbeat, not when the players are playing, but because of the speed of sound, you got to give the downbeat ahead.

• 1:49:10Speaker 00

  I could not block out the sound of the plane. I could not do the downbeat before the players play. And I tried conducting an orchestra. UCLA invited me to conduct the orchestra and I conducted the orchestra once. And because I cannot anticipate the downbeat, I gave up my desire to be a, to conduct an orchestra, although I would have loved doing it. So, but I've ended up doing the, doing the things that I'm good at, doing things that I love doing, doing things that are important for the world, good for the world.

• 1:49:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  I agree on all, all fronts, not that you need my agreement. I said there were two questions. You answered the second question in the process of answering the first question. So I just want to conclude by saying, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come share with us and educate us. I'm super excited about Profits, Profits, Coaches and Kings, When Do Leaders Matter? Today's conversation only makes me more excited about it. I will say that your, 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.

• 1:50:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's inspired a ton of curiosity and learning in me through your books. And today's just another extension of that. And I'm sure that this next book will just continue that. So thank you for not obeying his request and at the same time obeying his request. I really appreciate your time and coming here today and hopefully we'll do it again.

• 1:50:48Speaker 00

  Thank you. I've enjoyed a lot, I'm talking with you, you know, for, you know yourself, for, for writing book, when one does interviews and podcasts and interviewers differ, they're not all the same. Some interviewers are better prepared than other interviewers. Some interviewers know more about the subject than other interviewers. It's a real pleasure to do a conversation with you. You're, it's a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you.

• 1:51:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you. The pleasure was mine and we'll do it again. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond. To learn more about his work and his recent book, Profits, Profits, Coaches and Kings, please see the links in the show note caption. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments

• 1:52:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.

• 1:52:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.