367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, their biological and physical abilities, and their geographical and environmental contexts. Sometimes, it would seem, history -- or corporations, or religions, or sports teams -- can be affected by the actions of just a few influential persons. In his new book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings https://www.harpercollins.com/products/profits-prophets-coaches-and-kings-jared-diamond?variant=46032975495202, Jared Diamond asks what effect leaders can have, and what it is that makes them successful (or not). Right now, Babbel is offering listeners who want to learn a new language up to 60% off. Go to https://babbel.com/MINDSCAPE. #ad Preserve your online privacy at Incogni and get 60% off an annual plan at https://incogni.com/MINDSCAPE. #ad Monthly pledges to FarmKind to help fight factory farming will be boosted by 50% at https://farmkind.giving/MINDSCAPE. #ad Blog post with transcript: https://preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/09/07/367-jared-diamond-on-the-course-of-history-and-the-role-of-leaders/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Jared Diamond received a Ph. D. in physiology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his awards are the U. S. National Medal of Science, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Prize. His international bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel has sold over seven million copies. Web site http://jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Welcome.html UCLA web page https://geog.ucla.edu/person/jared-diamond/ Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jared-Diamond/author/B000AQ01ZS Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. History, to me, has always been one of the most intimidating academic subjects, just because it's at the opposite end of physics in the simplification scale. If you think about how many things happened in any one historical period, literally the number of events that you could potentially write down and record. Well, it's infinite, or it's essentially infinite. You know, if you think about every single person doing everything that they're doing, history has to be a story of picking and choosing, certain things being important and certain things being unimportant. And it's more than just picking ones that sort of are popular or whatever.

• 1:49Sean Carroll?

  You know, when we say what's important, what's unimportant, we're trying to be explanatory. We're trying to tell a story that makes sense of history. Why did this happen? What might be learned from this particular thing happening at that particular point in time? And once you start doing that, once you start asking like, why did this happen? Why did that happen? There is one obvious question that comes up over and over again, not yet completely settled, of course, which is the relative importance of individuals, right? The great man theory of history, or at least the idea that one plucky, charismatic, right place, right time, individual person can make choices that have a huge impact

• 2:32Sean Carroll?

  on the historical trajectory that goes from there versus the idea that actually they don't. Like, maybe we tell stories of presidents and kings and generals and scientists and whatever, but really, even without those individuals, things would have happened almost exactly the same. It's very hard to tell because we only have one historical record, right? We can't actually run the parallel universes and see what's going on. So one of the voices that you might sometimes hear in this debate about grand historical deterministic forces versus plucky individuals is today's guest, Jared Diamond, who is a professor at UCLA, who I'm not gonna, I'm not sure I'm gonna get this right.

• 3:13Sean Carroll?

  I believe he started as a professor of physiology and then moved into geography. We talked a little bit in the podcast about what it means to be a big picture interdisciplinary scientist. And of course, he had a very famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, back in like 1997, I think it was, where a very famous, big, big hit. You know, a lot of people read it. I read it, won the Pulitzer Prize. And it put forward the idea that, you know, you can't argue that certain areas of the world, certain continents and countries and things like that have kind of dominated a little bit in the last few centuries, have, you know, taken over other areas.

• 3:58Sean Carroll?

  And why is that? Is it because the people are just especially clever or have more initiative or whatever? And Diamond argued that no, it had nothing to do, almost nothing to do, with the differences between the people in one area or another. It had more to do with geography and the environment, the ability to do agriculture on large scales, the ability to have enough land, enough natural resources, different kinds of plants, but then also different kinds of metal and the guns in the title. And of course, germs, the ability to maintain immunity or resistance to certain diseases that other people elsewhere didn't have.

• 4:43Sean Carroll?

  So it was sort of a story where individuals didn't make much of a difference in that big picture sweep. So he's written many books since then, but the new book is called Profits, Profits, Coaches, and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? And there's some, I need to explain the title because you can't look at it. You can only hear me saying it. The two first words, profits and profits, are spelled P R O F I T S, as in money, P R O P H E T S, as in religious leaders. And also, the "When Do Leaders Matter?" subtitle, the word "when" is in parentheses. So it's also asking simultaneously, do leaders matter at all? So, you know, don't take the title incorrectly. It's not like a self-help book to be a good leader. It's asking the historical question.

• 5:28Sean Carroll?

  When do presidents and generals, but also CEOs and religious leaders, and for that matter, sports leaders like coaches, when do they matter? How much do they matter? How much is luck? How much is design and all that? So you'll be unsurprised to hear the answer is, it's complicated. Sometimes the answer is complicated. The leaders do matter, Diamond argues, but they don't always matter completely. And whether or not they're going to matter is going to depend a lot on the situation they're in. But that's okay. We love the complications here at the Mindscape Podcast. We're gonna dig in, figure out what those complications are, figure out when these people matter and when they don't. So let's go.

• 6:28Sean Carroll?

  Jared Diamond, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's good to be with you.

• 6:32Sean Carroll?

  You know, I know that you have a new book out, very excited to talk about it. Sadly for the audience, this is audio only, but Jared has a wonderful cover of the book in the background that you can see. And I'll put a link to the book, of course, in the show notes. But famously, you've written other books, and I wanted to kind of use your previous books just as an intro to get into the new one. So many of us have read Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example. That was a big hit. Could you tell us both, for those who haven't read it, what the basic idea of that book was? And then, how do you think about it a certain number of years later?

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Sure. Guns, Germs, and Steel is about the question, why are you and I now speaking English? You and I have evidently European background while we are standing on the land of Native Americans. Why did it work that way? Why is it not the case that the Aztec Emperor Montezuma came to Europe and imposed a language on all of Europe? And the last Europeans are living somewhere up in the Alps. Why did history turn out that way? The reason that, it's really the biggest question of history. The reason why it's a personal question for me is that I've worked in New Guinea,

• 7:56Speaker 03

  studying birds and evolution and setting up national parks since 1964. And when I first went to New Guinea in 1964, New Guineans were known as so-called traditional people. That's a, living by a lifestyle that humans had a practice for millions of years. New Guineans then did not have writing. They did not have metal tools. They had stone tools. They did not have state government. Why did it turn out that way? Why were New Guineans so-called, quote, "primitive people," although he wouldn't say that? And so I went out to New Guinea, naive.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  At that time, nobody understood why it did work that way. I went out expecting to find that New Guineans were different and there was something, something about New Guineans that explained why no writing, stone, or metal tools. And it took me about one day to realize that it was literal. One day, New Guineans are every bit as smart, if anything, smarter and more curious than Europeans. And the reason why New Guinea did not develop writing, et cetera, had nothing to do with New Guineans' brains versus Europeans' brains. There was some other explanation, but I didn't know the explanation. Historians didn't know the explanation. That question was on my, had been on my mind for decades.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  And that was the subject of my second book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which it took me 34 years after I started to work in New Guinea to figure out the answer, which I think with due respect is the correct answer.

• 9:41Sean Carroll?

  And what's the answer?

• 9:45Speaker 03

  The answer is, it has nothing to do with human brains, and it has everything to do with the the environment. Different environments offer different things that are the basis of the human population growth and human reserve capacity, human excess food that could feed people, he'd become full-time regal, because he'd enter and defeat businesses, figure out how to make marks to count sheep, and that developed the writing system.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Just as an example, Australia, Aboriginal Australia, the only continent where in modern times there was no agriculture. Why? It's not that Aboriginal Australians, there's anything wrong with Aboriginal Australia. It's that to this day, there is no Australian animal or plant that has been domesticated. European farmers coming to Australia have tried to domesticate kangaroos, and it doesn't work because of kangaroo's social system. So that's why Aboriginal Australians remained without writing or centralized government or metal tools. Whereas as the contrast case, the areas of the world with the most valuable wild plants and animals that were suitable for domestication,

• 11:15Speaker 03

  suitable for agriculture, which meant food surpluses, which meant food to feed proto-kings and proto-inventors. The richest place is the Fertile Crescent of Eastern Mediterranean, because that's where you have the wild ancestors of cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse, the five most valuable animals to this day, cow, sheep, goat, pig, and horse. They were domesticated beginning 11,000 years ago. And the Fertile Crescent is also the area with the most valuable wild plants. Wheat, the three different wheats, and peas, and beans, and lentils. So the hunter-gatherers of the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago got a head start on agriculture. Close behind were China.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  A little further behind were Mexico with great plants such as corn and tomatoes, but without big domesticable animals. The Andes, and then smaller areas of origins of agriculture were the Indian subcontinent and New Guinea, beloved New Guinea. There was sugarcane and yams and bananas, and then three parts of Africa. So a longer way of saying that the reason that you and I are speaking English not gnar bottle has everything to do with the wild plants and animals of the Fertile Crescent, which gave rise to Fertile Crescent civilization, which got carried into Europe

• 12:42Speaker 03

  and gave rise to European, quotes, civilization.

• 12:46Sean Carroll?

  Well, I noticed, though, that the people of the Fertile Crescent do not rule the world right now.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  That's right. There were things that happened. The Fertile Crescent had big advantages. Those advantages were the domesticable plants and animals. Once those domesticable plants and animals spread, and they spread quickly. They spread to Europe. Many, they spread eastwards. Some of them, sheep and wheat, spread to China. Once those advantages of the Fertile Crescent had spread out, the Fertile Crescent was left with no unique advantages. But apart from those domesticable plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent, even today, is not the greatest place. It's dry, it required irrigation, it's prone to salinization. And so the Fertile Crescent, once its advantages got spread through the rest of the world,

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Fertile Crescent did not have any advantage and fell behind.

• 13:40Sean Carroll?

  And I remember reading the book years ago and really enjoying it. The one, it generated a lot of controversy, as I'm sure you know. And I thought that, you know, some of it was interesting, some of it was less salient. The one thing I never quite came to an understanding myself is, so if you compare Europe, which sort of did win, in some sense, this competition, versus places like India or China, it wasn't clear to me why amongst those places that sort of all had all the advantages, why one came out ahead of time versus the others.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Europe initially had no advantages with regard to agriculture. The only thing significant domesticated in Europe, I believe that poppies were domesticated. You don't found a world civilization based on poppies. But Europe is immediately adjacent to the Fertile Crescent. So the Fertile Crescent plants and animals, already 8,000 B.C., spread from Turkey into Greece, then spread quickly across Europe. Europe then had advantages. On the question you raise, why Europe and why not India? Because Fertile Crescent stuff also spread to India, and some of it spread to China. Europe has geographic advantages that persist to this day.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Europe fronts on the Atlantic Ocean. India does not front on the Atlantic Ocean. Europe has this huge inlet, the world's biggest inland sea, the Mediterranean, which was a practice ground for shipbuilding and sailing. And so Europeans were prepared with the ships that they developed. Once they started poking out into the Atlantic, on the other side of the Atlantic was the New World. And Europeans already in 1500 rounded the tip of Africa and came up to India. The part of the world that came closest to Europe

• 15:44Speaker 03

  in developing ships and going around the world was China. China had big fleets with some bigger ships than Europe between 1400 and 1432. In 1432, China abolished its big fleets. Europe never did that. Why? Because China had one emperor, and that one emperor, the Chinese fleets, China had everything that it needed. The emperor eventually in 1432 said, these expensive fleets, they're bringing us back white giraffes, but we don't need white giraffes. There's nothing, China have everything that we need. So the emperor abolished the fleets. Whereas in Europe, because Europe began for geographic reasons, because of its peninsulas and its islands

• 16:27Speaker 03

  and its radially flowing rivers and its mountains. Europe has always been fragmented politically. To this day, Europe is fragmented politically. But fragmentation, you might think that unity would be invented. No. Fragmentation means that there are different parties that are competing with each other. And if one prince, and it happened in Europe, one prince said, these guns that we've developed, they're expensive and we're going to get rid of guns. What happened in Europe is next year, walked in. Whereas in China, the emperor of China not only abolished the fleet, but abolished an early industrial revolution. But in China, because there's one emperor, there was no other society that could say,

• 17:11Speaker 03

  that's a stupid thing, we'll take over.

• 17:14Sean Carroll?

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• 17:59Sean Carroll?

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• 18:35Sean Carroll?

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• 19:19Sean Carroll?

  break, your commute, or just a few minutes before bed. Babbel's award-winning app has sold over 25 million subscriptions and is backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you've got summer travel coming up, now's the time to start so you can actually use what you learn on the trip. Right now, Babbel's offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to babbel.com/mindscape. That's B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash Mindscape for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. So that's an interesting idea because it seems to say that there's this sort of heavy dose of influence from geography and the environment. At some point, politics and culture comes in, but it sounds like you're saying it can

• 20:03Sean Carroll?

  come in more dramatically when things are unified than when they're fragmented.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Politics and politics and culture, everybody has politics and culture. New Guineans, they're much more skilled at politics than Europeans are. So there's nothing unique about European politics and culture. What is distinctive about Europe, besides receiving early the richest agriculture in the world, other advantages of Europe was the geography of Europe. Each of those peninsulas, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, Spain, each of those peninsulas became a separate polity, competing with each other. The rivers of Europe flow radially.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  The two big rivers of China, Yangtze and Yangtze, they flow in parallel. They were quickly connected by canals. So China got unified already something like, gosh, 500 B.C. And China's been unified most of the time ever since. Paradoxically, though, unity has been a disadvantage, and disunity in Europe by stimulating competition has been an advantage. So Europe's geography with its peninsula and its island, the British island, Crete, et cetera, Europe's geography has been an advantage added on to the advantage of being next to the Fertile Crescent.

• 21:29Sean Carroll?

  I mean, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get at, and this might be a conjecture that is that is false, of course, everywhere has culture and politics, like you say. That's clearly true. I can imagine that the effects of culture and politics could be positive or could be negative. And when you're fragmented, you know, the positive effects are more likely to win out because you're competing with your neighbors. And when you're unified, there's just unpredictable fluctuations depending on who the emperor is.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  That's right. In China, so China led the world as of 1432. It not only had the best ships and the most ships, but China also invented gunpowder and compass and paper, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So China led the world in the Middle Ages. It was fortunate to have a series of, quote, "good emperors" who promoted development. And then China had emperors who did not promote development. So China's unity sometimes was advantageous, but in the long run, it was disadvantageous.

• 22:36Sean Carroll?

  And, okay, so if the story is holding together of geography and environment giving people a kind of first mover advantage, the world seems very different now, 500, 1,000 years later. We have technology. It's a sort of a different world. Is geography and environment still all that important, or has the focus shifted?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Oh, geography and environment still important. There are social scientists, including good admired friends of mine, who would say, say, "No, what counts today is..." Think of the map of Africa. Take a map of Africa with its 48 countries, and on each of those countries, write the average per capita income. If you do that, you will see that Africa is a sandwich. The North Coast, the five countries of the North Coast, and the three countries of the South Coast, almost all of them are richer than any of the countries in the middle, although

• 23:43Speaker 03

  the countries of the North Coast, like Egypt and else, they're not famous for great institutions and the most superb government, but they're in the temperate zone.

• 23:52Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Where the rest of Africa is in the tropics. The tropics have geographic disadvantages. They have tropical diseases, notably malaria and yellow fever and others, sleeping sickness. The tropical soils have low productivity compared to the high productivity of the soils of temperate zone. So that's one serious disadvantage of geography in Africa today. The other disadvantage, again, take that map of Africa and put the numbers for per capita income. What you'll see is that the inland countries of Africa, the countries that don't have any seacoast, almost all of them are poorer than almost any one of the countries with seacoast. Why?

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Because if you don't, if you've got a seacoast, transportation by sea is seven times cheaper per mile, per kilogram than transportation over land. But all of the inland countries of Africa have to transport by railroad or a truck or by airplane, but that's much more expensive. So does geography make any difference today? Yes, geography is probably the reason why Africa is poor and why the inland countries of Africa are poorer and why the tropical countries of Africa are poorer.

• 25:10Sean Carroll?

  Okay, very good. I do encourage all of the listeners out there who haven't read the book to read it. It's a fascinating view of the big-scale history of the world. Actually, which makes me think, let me ask this slightly off-kilter question, because we joked about, you know, not everyone agreed with the book when it came out, right? There's people who are going to disagree. And part of that is just you're trying something so ambitious, right? And you necessarily need to synthesize many areas together. And I get that. I worry sometimes that our modern intellectual environment penalizes you just for trying to do that, because people will say, "Well, you didn't get my specialty exactly the way I would have said it."

• 25:54Speaker 03

  You, as a university professor like me, has probably had experience of what happens when you set foot outside your discipline. My PhD was in medical physiology. I made my reputation by studying the gallbladder. Not the most important organ, but the gallbladder is a good model for intestine and kidneys, which are important organs. So I was the world expert on the gallbladder, and I was appointed professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School in order to teach medical students kidney physiology and intestinal physiology. But at the same time, as a child, I'd gotten interested in birds.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  I developed early on, in fact, just after my PhD, I developed a second career in New Guinea birds. And in fact, I'm better known, much better known than most scientists, for my work on evolution and ecology, and for my work on gallbladder physiology. And then particularly when my wife and my twin sons were born, they were born just short of my 50th birthday, and when my twin sons were born, I realized the future of my boys is not going to depend upon gallbladders. It's going to depend on the state, history, and geography. So that, plus getting a MacArthur Fellowship, motivated me to switch my interests from

• 27:21Speaker 03

  medical physiology to history and geography. But to go back to the penalties in academia for stepping outside of your discipline, there's, in academia, a belief that you should stick to what you know about. And if you go into other subjects, that's because you're all washed up. You are no longer a discipline of the gallbladder or physics. You're going out into other fields because you can't make it. And interestingly, UCLA has been good to me. I've been promoted steadily. It was only one time when I was denied a promotion at UCLA, and that was immediately

• 28:06Speaker 03

  after Guns, Germans, and Stu was published and won the Pulitzer Prize.

• 28:10Sean Carroll?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  Until then, my colleagues in the physiology department didn't know about Jared's work on New Guinea birds. They knew about his work on the gallbladder. And when I got the Pulitzer Prize and they realized that Jared was studying New Guinea birds, my promotion dossier said Jared has written this book about history and geography, but we can't judge it, and so we're not going to consider it. We note that his papers on New Guinea birds have a lower citation count. His paper on New Guinea birds gets 49 citation counts, or somebody who's studying the 73rd amino acid of beta-cyanocyanide has a citation count of 2,000. So we're not going to promote him.

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Fortunately, my chair did sympathize with me, but that just illustrates that there is a penalty, a severe penalty in academia, for going outside of your specialty.

• 29:04Sean Carroll?

  I love that story. I'd never heard that story before, and I think it's a good illustration for the listeners of how, because sometimes I get asked, like, "How much does it help you to have written books rather than just articles?" And you have to explain that it can actually, it can, not necessarily, but it can actually hurt you. And, I mean, if winning the Pulitzer Prize hurts you, then, yeah, what can the rest of us do?

• 29:30Sean Carroll?

  Speaking of books, I don't want to go through all the books because we need to get to prophets and prophets, but I did want to touch on Collapse as one of the books you're talking about because we're doing this arc from this grand history, geography and the environment. And in the new book, you're looking at people, individuals, and the impacts that they can have. And I'm guessing, even though I'll confess I haven't read it, I mean Collapse, about the collapse of societies, might be somewhere in the middle? Like, both aspects intersect there?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Actually, Collapse is more closely related to Guns, German Steel, in that it's about societies, it's not about individuals. There are many societies that have collapsed in the past. Famous example, in the New World, classic Maya society, the most advanced society in the New World, collapsed around AD 900. There's still some argument about the contributions of causes, but probably the main factor was a drought in Maya society,

• 30:44Speaker 03

  and relative lack of access to water. The areas where the classic Maya survived were in areas next to lakes. So Collapse is still largely about societies, whereas my current book, Prophets, Prophets, Coaches of Kings, is about the role of individuals. And there are reasons, which is, I was born in 1937, which meant that my first dateable memory was the, I grew up in World War II, my first dateable memory was the cover of Life magazine

• 31:26Speaker 03

  that showed for the first time to the American public, dead American soldiers, two American soldiers lying face down, drowned in Luna Beach, 1940. That is the first thing that I can remember. And growing up during World War II, my memories as a child were memories of World War II. The last, my mother's family disappeared in World War II. I then married into a Polish family, of which one branch ended up in Auschwitz, some survived, some didn't survive. The other branch ended up in a Siberian concentration camp. So, my

• 32:05Speaker 03

  life has been spent in the shadow of leaders, but also my life has been spent with advantages gained from leaders. There are many wonderful leaders to whom I owe the career that I've been able to make. And so, the book that I decided to write, after the year 2019, when I published my book, Upheaval, about crises in different societies, I decided I was ready to write a book about leaders. And that's why the current book is not about big society, it's about leaders, and it's about the question, when do leaders make a difference, and when don't they make a difference? Why do they make a difference under some circumstances?

• 32:49Speaker 03

  And it looks at leaders in different spheres. Of course, in the political sphere, because I grew up in the world of Hitler, but also in the business sphere, what difference did Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs make, if any? Could someone else have done it? Also, sports, because at age nearly 50, I became the father of young boys who became interested in sports, in order to have something to talk about with my sons. Gallbladders, yes, I watched NBA and NFL and World Cup games with my son. So, the third chunk of my book is about sport. When do coaches make a difference? And then the last chunk of my book is about

• 33:33Speaker 03

  religion. If Jesus Christ had died in childbirth, would we still have, as the largest world of religion today, a world religion that came out of the Mediterranean? So, those are the four areas that I looked at. And then in the epilogue, I looked to areas where there are big questions of leadership that could be addressed by similar methods. Leadership in the area of, say, art, and why were the great composers of the 17th and 18th, 19th

• 34:12Speaker 03

  century Germans? Why unearths? Science, why Darwin? Why Mendel? Military history, do generals make a difference? Tolstoy's War and Peace is virtually dedicated to themes that generals don't make a difference. They give orders, but in the lines, they don't hear the orders. And then, of course, social protest. Did Mahatma Gandhi make a difference? Did Martin Luther King make a difference? So, I look, in my current book, I look at leadership in these different spheres. And yes, there are common themes, and also, interestingly,

• 34:51Speaker 03

  the methods, the understanding of when, where the sports coaches make a difference, has been developed especially by professors of business school.

• 35:06Sean Carroll?

  Yep.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Because similar questions arise in business and in sports, but sports is much better for looking questions leaders, because in sports, you see the results every week. In business, you either never see the results, or you see them every five years. Sports, you're on the sideline, bouncing up and down, whereas who knows what Bill Gates was doing?

• 35:27Sean Carroll?

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• 38:17Sean Carroll?

  I guess the reason why I thought in my mind to connect it to Collapse was, one of the formative podcast conversations I had many years ago when I started this, was with Edward Watts, who is a historian of Rome. And he was talking about the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement by the empire, and he placed a lot of emphasis on these two brothers, the Gracchi Brothers. I don't know if you're familiar with their story. But I asked him, I said, you know, why are you saying that these two people mattered so much? Haven't we gotten beyond that? Don't we no longer believe in the great man theory of history? And his answer, which stuck with me, was, I think that most of the time, if you're in a healthy system, the individual is not going to matter. But

• 39:02Sean Carroll?

  when the system is weak, an individual pushing one way or the other can make all the difference. Is that something that jibes with your experience, having written this book?

• 39:11Speaker 03

  That's an interesting formulation. The Gracchi Brothers, my background, in school, my background was in classics.

• 39:20Sean Carroll?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  When I went to Harvard and majored in biochemistry, for three years, I'm proud to say, I won the classics prize for three years, even if I worked hard at Latin and Greek. So, the Gracchi Brothers, I don't have an opinion about, Augustus and Julius Caesar, I think one can make an argument for, but it's difficult to make a strong argument in the past, because we just don't have the richness of information we have at present.

• 39:49Sean Carroll?

  Sure.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  In the politics section of my book, I discuss only politicians in the last, from 1940 onwards, because we have rich documentation from photographs, and then from television. I cut off at 2000. I do not say anything about Angela Merkel or Donald Trump, because we can't pass judgment on them yet. The story is not finished. The politicians that I looked at were politicians from 1940 to 2000, where we have a rich database. And there, yes,

• 40:32Speaker 03

  one can tell biographies. In the case of the Gracchi Brothers, yes, there are biographies of the Gracchi Brothers, but who knows whether the biographies are biased. But in modern times, yes, we have the method of biography, but we have another powerful method, the method of natural experiments. I understand that your background includes physics.

• 40:55Sean Carroll?

  It does.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Physicists do manipulative experiments. I, as a gallbladder physiologist, did manipulative experiments. I dipped my gallbladders in potassium solution or sodium solutions. We could do manipulative experiments. But in politics, it's not possible. And if it were possible, it wouldn't be legal or nice to do manipulative experiments. We could learn a lot about whether Hitler made a difference if we could have, say, 20 time machines and 20 worlds, and 10 of which Hitler died in the 93rd and 10 he didn't die. Or we could learn a lot today if we could experimentally kill half the leaders in the world. If that's

• 41:40Speaker 03

  not nice, we couldn't do it. But the fact is that of the world's leaders, a significant fraction have either died natural deaths in office. Since World War II, there have been, I think, something like 85 leaders who died natural deaths, especially heart attack, cancer, drowning like Harold Holt, falling off a horse to deserve. But there were also leaders who've been assassinated. A significant number, I think 57 leaders, have been assassinated. And you can use those as natural experiments. You can compare what happened in countries where a leader died of a heart attack or got assassinated, and you compare those with 200 countries where the leader did not die of a heart attack. That's what's called a

• 42:24Speaker 03

  natural experiment. Natural experiments, what I've had to use in New Guinea to study New Guinea birds. I'm not permitted to run around locally exterminating New Guinea birds. But I can compare mountains in New Guinea that happen to have the lower mouse babble with mountains that happen to have, not have, the lower mouse babble. And I can look at the effect on the mountain mouse babble to have or not to have the lower mouse babble. Those are natural experiments. And that's the method, relatively new method in social sciences. It's a powerful method with its own problems that has given the most insight into leaders in politics, business, sports, and even religion.

• 43:09Sean Carroll?

  What you say reminds me a lot of your UCLA colleague Judea Pearl, who was a former guest on the podcast, who really helped me understand how, you know, a lot of causal analysis can be hidden in the actual data. And you, in principle, have to do experiments to extract it. And in practice, in social sciences, you often have to rely on these like happy parallelisms between different things happening that are sort of natural experiments, like you said.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Right. Let me give you an example of a natural experiment.

• 43:47Sean Carroll?

  Sure.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  This is in the business world. A standard question in the business world is, do CEOs, the heads of company, do they make a difference? They claim they do, and that's how they justify they're getting paid a million, or 100 million, or a trillion dollars. But students of business have debated whether CEOs really make a difference. There are a couple approaches to it. One is statistical, analysis of variance. You can look what happens when a leader, when a business leader gets transferred, gets fired, and goes to another company. You can

• 44:31Speaker 03

  then see, you can look at the effect of leaders separately from the company. And you can do an analysis of variance to separate statistically the effect of leader, of the year, of the industry, and of the particular company. That's one method. The other method is the natural experiment. In the business world, if we could experimentally kill leaders, well, that's not nice. If we could experimentally make them sick, that's also not nice, although it's not terribly. If we could experimentally make them sick, make them unhappy, distract them. How can we get them distracted? If we were an all-powerful experiment, we could get CEOs distracted by

• 45:16Speaker 03

  killing their only child, or killing their spouse. That gets them really distracted. Or we could kill their sibling. Psychologists will tell you that the death of a sibling isn't quite as bad, but it's the next worst thing to death of a spouse or child. Or we could kill their parent, less bad than killing their sibling. Or we could kill their parent in law. Well, again, it's not nice to, but it happens as a natural experiment, and the data are very good. In Denmark, Denmark has something like 78,000 companies, and the Danish government has public statistics on all those companies and their CEOs. Indication

• 45:57Speaker 03

  in Denmark, if you go into a hospital, if you get hospitalized, or if you die in the hospital, it's part of public record. So business school professors in Denmark just punched in the keys, and they found out for the CEO of every one of those 78,000 companies in Denmark, whether the CEO's child, or only child, or spouse, or brother or sister died. And if so, the CEO gets very distracted, or still less distracted. And it turns out that when a close relative of a CEO dies, the company's profits take a hit for a year

• 46:39Speaker 03

  or two, because the CEOs distract. And CEOs do make a difference. The biggest hit is if an only child or a spouse dies. The next biggest hit, if a sibling dies. The lowest hit is if a parent dies, and if the mother-in-law dies. The only death in the family that improves the profits of the business is the death of mother-in-law, but it's not statistically significant.

• 47:09Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  That's an example of a natural experiment. We can't go around killing relatives, but relatives die all over the place. And we can use that information, the effect on the company, to see the effect of distraction of the CEO.

• 47:26Sean Carroll?

  And what's nice about this is it's not just qualitative. You're going to be able to say, or at least you're going to aspire to say, how much of the success or failure of a company can be attributed to features of the leader?

• 47:39Speaker 03

  That's right. For example, one detailed study by a social scientist, Alison McKay, I think was her name. She looked only at companies where a CEO was transferred from one company to another. And so that was not the entire database, but part of the database. And what she concluded from those CEO transfers, if CEOs, if there are good CEOs and bad CEOs, a CEO transferred from one company to another may do well at both companies. And so you can then sort it out. Her conclusion was that CEOs account for about 30% of the variation

• 48:21Speaker 03

  in profits, and that the industry, some industries are more profitable than other industries. For example, perfume manufacturing, or teenage t-shirts, that's a profitable industry. Whereas public utilities, it's so tightly regulated, it's not a terribly profitable industry. So 30, Alison McKay found that 30% of the profits are due to the leader. Something like 20% each are due to the industry, and 20% to the individual company. Procter & Gamble has been a well-run company for 150 years. And even within its

• 49:04Speaker 03

  industry, soap, et cetera, industry, Procter & Gamble is a relatively profitable company. And then the effect of different years, yes, there are depressions, but on the average, the year affects, accounts for only about 3% of the variation in profits. That was Alison's study, based on CEOs who switch companies. If you relax that requirement for CEOs to switch companies, you have a larger database. And in that case, you end up with a lower effect of CEOs. You conclude that CEOs account for maybe 15%, and that the industry and

• 49:46Speaker 03

  the individual company account for some more, 20%. But what we can say is that on the overall, CEO and industry and company have major effects of comparable size, and the smallest effect on the average is of year. Naturally, in 1930, the

• 50:09Sean Carroll?

  It was that year.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  That year, 2008 and 2002. But on the average, the year makes less of a difference than these other things.

• 50:19Sean Carroll?

  So it's interesting, you mentioned CEOs switching companies, because as you were speaking, I was thinking, how do you disentangle the impact of a competent CEO from the impact of a competent structure that chose a good CEO that would have been there anyway?

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Let's think how to answer that. A competent structure that chooses a good CEO, I'm hard-pressed to think of a major company that has had an unblemished or even a productive, I'm serious about that.

• 50:56Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, no, I get it.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Time and time again. So I would say that's a very minor consideration.

• 51:03Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good to know. All right, this is super helpful. And so we're, you know, rolling up our sleeves and trying to get into this world. I always say at this point in the podcast, thank goodness I'm a physicist, because things are so much cleaner and easier to understand, and your data is much messier. But it's fascinating. So let's go back to the beginning of your book. At the beginning of your book, you tell us the story of a 1930 car crash that could have killed Hitler. And would that have made the world a different place? So we'll allow for spoilers here. What is the answer to that?

• 51:41Speaker 03

  I have to say, and this, this is good, this may sound shameless. But I just received the day before yesterday, the bare copies of my book. I received two copies and one of those copies was immediately sequestered by one of my sons, leaving me one copy. But last night before going to sleep, I just browsed the beginning of my book.

• 52:03Sean Carroll?

  Of course.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  And, you know, I had distance on it. It had been some time since I read it. And my book had its ups and downs. There was a time when I was discouraged and I was thinking of that and both. But I, so I have some distance. And when I read the book last night, hmm, that's good.

• 52:23Sean Carroll?

  Good.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  First paragraph of the book is that on a date, I think in March of 1930, there was a car accident. Hitler was being driven by his chauffeur. Hitler was in the right, the right passenger seat of his chauffeur driven car going into an intersection. And by chance at right angles to Hitler's car came a big truck. The Hitler chauffeur and the truck driver ultimately braked and accelerated to avoid the crash.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  The truck never less struck Hitler's car on the right side, the side with Hitler, and pushed across the intersection up onto a barrier at the far side. And, and if the truck had been going a bit, bit faster, it would have run over Hitler's and Hitler would have died. In fact, the truck stopped just enough short. Hitler was somewhat wounded. He shouted to the people in the backseat, everybody okay? But he survived. If Hitler had died in 1930, Hitler came to power in March 1933.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  If Hitler had died in 1930, I asked, would we still have the Holocaust and World War II that killed 50 million people? There's no, Hitler was clearly a distinctive person, distinctively evil person, who not only was anti Semitic and killed a few Jews in pogroms, but he had industrial scale killing of Jews and other people. Hitler was a mesmerizing speaker. Hitler was a genius at size and deceiving people. Hitler deceived Neville Chamberlain. He deceived so many foreign politicians.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  He deceived German generals and German business people. He deceived his fellow Nazi. He was a brilliant deceiver and he was a whisper taker. He, he, he was convinced that he was going to die early and so he wanted to do things quickly. And so he took risks. Some of the risks paid off, like the march into the Rhine, World War II. Some of the risks did not pay off. The decision not to evacuate Stalingrad and the decision to launch the Battle of the Bulge. So Hitler was a distinctive person. One can argue therefore that Hitler, Hitler made a difference.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  But the, the other side of it is that Germany lost World War I and the Treaty of Versailles imposed stringent conditions on, on Germany. The 1923 hyperinflation in Germany destroyed Germany's middle class. And it resulted from the occupation of the Ruhr by the victors of World War, World War I. So one can say that, that any leader of Germany after World War I, a prior objective would have been to undo the effects of World War I. Germany had Streismann, the Foreign Minister Streismann, sought to undo the effects of World War I peacefully.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Hitler sought to undo the effects by, by war. What it means then is that it's a big question. Did Hitler make a difference or did Hitler not make a difference? Even historians disagree. Probably most historians view Hitler as uniquely evil, but a famous British historian, A.J. P. Fitztaylor, one of the most famous British historians, wrote, wrote a book in, in which, without discovering any, any significant new facts about Hitler, he retold the story of Hitler's life. And he said Hitler was a normal German politician with normal goals of undoing the effects

• 56:38Speaker 03

  of World War II. And he was a normal person. When Hitler fired the, his two top generals in 1937, he fired them because one of them was accused of homosexuality. And according to A.J. P. Taylor, Hitler was genuinely morally outraged that this general was homeless homosexual. And so Hitler fired this general. Well, it's difficult to, for most people to imagine Hitler being generally, being genuinely outraged about it. A.J. P. Taylor is a famous historian. Anyway, that, that's, that's an open question. Did Hitler make a difference?

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• 58:42Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good. But it's, it sounds like, you know, in the, in the world of arguments we could make, we could make an argument that World War II would have happened even without Hitler, but maybe it would have been a very, very different war overall.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Right. And, and that, the people often ask me, Jared, can you, can you summarize in one sentence the conclusion of your book? My first, oh my God, summarize, summarize my three and 90 page book in one sentence. But there, there are some general lessons that one can, can come to from the book. Leaders sometimes make a difference. There are various ways in which they can make a difference. There are some leaders who are uniquely qualified to do some particular thing.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  And in fact, my second chapter is about the founding president of Botswana, Suretzi Karma, who Botswana was for, for a while after independence, the fastest growing economy in the world. Suretzi Karma's founding president was uniquely qualified to do it. Why? Because Botswana on independence had only 21 university graduates. He would, if your founding president, Helsbein University grad, he was one of them. In addition, he had been educated in the United Kingdom. He had a British wife. So he straddled, he straddled both worlds, the European world and the African world.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  He was the, the chief of the biggest tribe in Botswana. And so, so when he upon independence said, let's abolish the power of the chiefs, there was no, he was the only chief as the strongest chief who could get away with abolishing the power of chiefs. And similarly, diamonds were found in Botswana on the land of his tribe.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Any other tribe would have said, those diamonds are ours. They're not Botswana's. But Sarete Kama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe on whose land the diamonds were found, he could say, those diamonds are the property of Botswana, not of my chieftain. So he was uniquely qualified to be a leader. So there were other leaders, a few leaders, not many, who uniquely qualified to be leaders. There are other leaders who are not uniquely qualified, but who do things in a distinctive way. For example, if we turn back to the business world. Jeff Bezos.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Jeff Bezos founded an everything store, Amazon. Is Jeff Bezos the only person who could have founded an everything store? Well, there are 350 million Americans and you can't make an argument that Jeff Bezos was uniquely qualified to found an everything store. But there were other leaders who founded other everything stores, but they operate in different ways. Already before Jeff Bezos, there was eBay, which operates on a principle different from Amazon. There was a Cleveland bookstore that operates on a different way from Amazon, things sells only books. There is Walmart, which is an everything store, but it doesn't do it online. It does it as a brick and mortar store.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  So one can say that some leaders make a difference, not because they did what nobody else could have done, but that they did it in a distinctive way. And I think that's true of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. So those are two different ways in which a leader can make a difference.

• 1:02:31Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, that's very good. And you've already mentioned some of the people that I wanted to ask you about, but I know we're not going to get a chance to go through all of the colorful personalities in your book. Let me just give you a chance. What are the other examples? What are the other case studies that you feel like are especially things that people should know about and learn about? Your favorite ones?

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Well, they're all my favorite ones and people should know about all of them. But if we want to go to the next. So we've talked about, we talked about politics. We've talked about business. Talk about sports coaching. Sports coaches frequently get fired. The reason they get fired is a losing season. In Argentina, in the Argentinian Football League, there are something like 400 firings every year. Similarly, in the German football. German coaches last on the average, a year and a half. So coaches frequently get fired. At UCLA, we had a great coach, John Wooden.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  And John Wooden was followed by a series of basketball coaches, every one of whom got fired. They got fired even though their win-loss record was much better than the win-loss record of most American basketball coaches, but they didn't live up to John Wooden. It turns out that coaches get fired for a losing record, but there are many things that contribute to a losing record besides the coach. A good player, just a illness. On the output, for statistical reason, you know this very well. For statistical reason, if you have a random series, say you have dice, dice with six

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  numbers on it, and you throw the dice and one die comes up with one on it. Statistically, the chances of five out of six that your next throw is to come up with better than one, because there are five different positions on the dice. Similarly, with sports coaching, there is, as far as the coaches are concerned, there are lots of random factors. And so when you fire a coach, simply because of regression to the mean, just for random reasons, the coach gets fired for reasons that don't have much to do with the coach. And for, just by chance, the next year is likely to be better.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  And so for a while, students of sports said that it's right to follow coaches, to fire coaches, because when you fire a coach, on the average, the next year is better. But then, what about throwing the dice? No, what we have to do is to compare the performance next year if you fire the coach with a performance next year if you do not fire the coach. And it turns out then that the effect of the coach is much less than if you do not do that testing. So coaches do make a difference, but you can do an analysis of variance, just as in the business world.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  And the conclusion that you come to is that coaches, they make more of a difference in college sports than in professional, let's see if I got, in college sports than in professional sports. Because in professional sports, you have players who are there for a much longer time. So Bill Belichick, Tom Brady was around there for, what, 18 years. The Super Bowl successors, were they due to Bill Belichick? Well, when Tom Brady went, it looks as if the Super Bowl successors had a lot to do with Tom Brady. So in the sports world, coaches do make a contribution to outcome, but they're not

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  the overwhelmingly dominant contribution to outcome. They have a bigger effect in college sports than in professional sports. And for you and all of you who watched the World Cup, so with my sons and with my wife, in order to maintain my good relationship with my sons, I watched the World Cup. So Argentina lost the final game to Spain, and they lost it in an inexcusable way that students of sports coaching would have predicted.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  It turns out that the biggest effect that a football coach, an American football coach, and probably a soccer coach has on the outcome is not by, in American football, telling the players to throw a forward pass or to run with it, and not as in soccer, by training your players to kick the ball well. The biggest effect is of teaching your players not to incur penalties. In that last game, it was, the score was 0-0 going into the last period. If it had ended up 0-0, it would have gone to a penalty shootout.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  And because Argentina had a great goalie, Argentina probably would have won the penalty shootout. But the Argentine coach had not trained his players not to incur penalties. And so all the yellow cards, without exception, all the yellow cards were Argentinas'. Spain did not get a single yellow card. And when one Argentine player got the second yellow, that was a red card, Argentina went down from 11 to 10 players, and Spain was able to score. So that's an example, yielding a non-obvious conclusion, that at least in American football, the biggest effect of the coach is not in telling a quarterback to throw a forward

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  pass, but instead is in training the players not to fumble and not to incur penalties. And that conclusion was reached not by sports analysts. It was reached by public policy, business school professors. The reason is that the water for sports is so good that business school professors test their methods by looking at sports outcomes.

• 1:08:55Sean Carroll?

  Well, exactly. Sports is the most hyper data-analyzed aspect of our lives, because it's both, we collect all the data, but then we also publish it. It's in the newspapers every morning, right? And it's a wonderful playground for that. So my next question would be, you know, since we can study the coaches so quantitatively, have we learned anything that translates to these other areas that you're talking about, politics and business and so forth, from thinking about what makes a good coach?

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, indeed. The methods used in the last 20 years to figure out whether CEOs make a difference.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Were developed by, especially by business school professors, who tested their methods on sports. And then they applied those methods to the business world. So for example, what I was just relating to you, that, um, a, a, an American football coach has his biggest, has his or her biggest effect by teaching players not to incur penalties or not to fumble. The authors of that paper were two public policy, they were not sports analysts, they were public policy professors who developed methods, developed sophisticated statistical methods for testing the effects of sports coaches.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  And then they applied those methods to testing the effects of CEOs and of politicians. And they found that those methods that worked for coaches also work for politicians. For example, it turns out that, that within the United States, governors of states have more power, make more of a difference than do mayors of cities. Mayors of cities, they're severely constrained. Um, in, in, in my city, Los Angeles, um, most of Los Angeles, they don't even vote, bother to vote. We have an election coming up and the turnout of Los Angeles voters and mayor elections is only 20%. Why? Because we know that the mayor doesn't make that much, the mayor doesn't have that much power.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  But that insight, that quantitative insight comes from business school professors who debugged their methods on sports coaches.

• 1:11:18Sean Carroll?

  I, I want to go back to the, the penalty thing because I want to make sure that I get it clearly. The claim is not that the, the most important part of winning is having fewer penalties. It's that where coaches have the most leverage is in training their teams to have fewer penalties.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  That's right. The, the, the biggest difference between coaches, um, naively, if, if, if you ask someone in sports, what's the difference, um, between successful, less successful business coach, uh, sport, football coaches? Most people would say, well, well, it's in knowing, knowing when, how often to throw a pass. And it's true that, that a forward, an 85 year, 85 yard touchdown with a four, boy, that's really exciting. But what, um, has a bigger, what a coach does that has bigger effect on the outcome of the game is by getting his players not to fumble and not to incur penalties.

• 1:12:16Sean Carroll?

  That is very good.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  Point.

• 1:12:19Sean Carroll?

  And, and I guess, you know, we're near the hour mark of the podcast now, so finally we can hit the fourth category, right there in your title, which is the fun one, which is religion. Obviously, religion is sort of the, the apotheosis of the charismatic leader, right? Like you can have a bureau, a boring technocratic leader in a sports team or a business, but almost by definition, your religious leader is going to have some charisma there. So what are the similarities and differences, you think?

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Um, starting with this, with the differences, perhaps the biggest difference is the one that you just mentioned. For a religious leader, a religious leader has to have charisma. In the business world or in the political world, it's often said that charisma is important, but sometimes yes and sometimes no. Among, yes, Hitler was charismatic. Winston Churchill was, was charismatic. Agustín Pinochet of Chile was not, nobody would call him, him charismatic. So charisma is one way to get ahead in the political world, but there are other ways. You can instead terrify people. You can be good at guiding group discussions.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

  You can, there are other, other ways to be, in fact, a political leader. But in the world of religion, you have to be charismatic. But someone who's charismatic, to be, for a religion to be successful and spread, spread around the world, you need more than charisma. You need to have good organization and often, um, you, you need to have a good military organization, either offensive or defensive, because religions as they're developing, get attacked. And so for example, the Mormons, as they arose, Mormons got attacked. Joseph Smith developed basically a Mormon army to defend the Mormons and also to attack, attack non, non Mormons.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  In the case of early Christianity, when early Christianity arose as, as a Jewish sect, early Christianity was such a tiny group that there was no question of, of Jesus or St. Paul developing an army. It were centuries and centuries before Christianity developed an army. And yes, by 1500 onwards, Christian armies, um, um, were, were important to the spread of, of Christianity by, by killing or forcing non-Christian. But in the rise of Christianity, um, in the rise of Christianity and in the case of Joseph Smith, um, a new religion requires three figures who may be incorporated in the same

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  person. Jesus was the charismatic person. Jesus was not a military leader. Jesus was not a great organizer. St. Paul was the great organizer and much later came Christian generals. In the case of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith was the charismatic figure, but the great organizer was Brigham Young. So the difference between religion and the other spheres is that religion requires two separate sets, sets of talent, charisma and organization. And often it requires a third set, namely military organization, whereas that's not

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  in the business, in the business world. Jeff Bezos, um, did not have an army that spread Amazon around the United States.

• 1:16:00Sean Carroll?

  Let, let's hope not. Yeah, that, that would be bad. But okay, good. That's, that actually reminds me of something I should have asked earlier. Are we even making sense when we talk about good leaders or bad leaders? Or should we put more emphasis on right place, right time kind of considerations? Like, does being a good leader, is that a universal thing? Or does it really depend on your match to the situation you find yourself in?

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Um, yes. Um, a, a, an able leader, um, can be effective only at certain times and places. And so it, an interesting three-way division. There are leaders who were aware of the importance of time and place and looked for the right time and place and stepped forward only when they figured out that the time and place was right for them. Charles de Gaulle, twice, became president of France at the end of World War II, stepped down within two years because he figured that the time is not right to be president.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  He, but he made, he, he remained visible. And at the time of 1958, um, Algerian crisis, he, he saw my moment has come. He was conscious of this and he made himself available. So there were some leaders who select the time. Bill Gates, prime example. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both saw the January, what is it, 1976, 1970, cover of Popular Electronics magazine that reported on an Intel microchip that was much more powerful than anything previous. And until then, Bill Gates had told Paul Allen, the time is not right. Yeah, yeah, your interest in microchip is so much, but the time is not right. But when Bill Gates saw that cover of Popular Electronics, he went to Paul Allen and said,

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  now is the time, we got to act now because other people will do it. So first of all, you have leaders who recognize the time and place and choose it, choose it, make it. Secondly, you have leaders who recognize that the time and place is right, but there's nothing that they can do to engineer their stepping into the leadership. Winston Churchill, there was not, Winston Churchill did not provoke World War II, by no means. But when Neville Chamberlain, um, um, the, the British prime minister before him, um, upon the invasion of France, was under pressure to resign, Winston Churchill was, was called

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  in first by Chamberlain, then by the king and offered the prime ministership. And Churchill, in his, in his five-volume biography, World War II, says, um, "On that, that evening when I was offered the prime ministership, I knew that this was the moment for which my entire life was a preparation. I couldn't bring it about, but this was the right time falling into my lap and I knew that I would succeed." So there were leaders who select the time. There were leaders who cannot select the time, but the time is offered to them and they know it.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  And then the third case is leaders who happen to become, step forward at the right time and place, although they have no idea that it was the right time and place. Genghis Khan, the greatest land conquering world history, the Mongol chief, chief, chief Genghis Khan. Why did Genghis Khan succeed in building the largest land empire that the world has ever known?

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  In the last 10 years, dendrochronologists, students of tree rings, looking at tree rings in pine trees in Central Asia, found that the wettest time in Central Asia in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis's birth. But a wet time on the steppes of Central Asia means lots of rain for sheep and goats, which is food for the Mongols, and lots of rain for horses, but every Mongol warrior needs 10 horses. So if Genghis had been born 20 years later, or if he had been born 200 miles to the south, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan, and Genghis Khan didn't know that he had this good horse.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, it's not that Mark Zuckerberg chose the year of his birth, and he chose to be a sophomore at Harvard in the year 2002. He happened to be, the year of his birth was given to him by his parents. And in 2002, he had tried various startups at Harvard in his first year. In 2000, he tried another startup, which became Facebook. But he had no idea that the timing was perfect. But in fact, there were social media before Mark Zuckerberg. They hadn't been successful partly because of inadequate technology.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Mark Zuckerberg happened to be born at the time of the right technological advances. He didn't know it. So in short, sorry, some leaders pick their time and place. Some leaders can't pick it, but they know that it's the right time and place. And some like Mark Zuckerberg or Genghis Khan happen to be in the right time and place, but they have no idea that it's the right time and place.

• 1:21:24Sean Carroll?

  So then for the final question, you know, your Pulitzer Prize winning book was about how geography and environment really governed a lot of, or has explanatory power for a lot of world history. And now you've really dug into the role of these individuals who are having outsized influence on the organizations they lead. So where do we strike the balance? Do you think that, do you think that as a society, we still give too much credit to individual leaders? Or are the leaders actually making even more of a difference than we suspect behind the scenes?

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  This is why people who interview me regularly get frustrated. Of course, Garry will give a quick answer, and my answer to you, sometimes it makes a difference, sometimes it doesn't make a difference.

• 1:22:14Sean Carroll?

  Of course.

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  But in my book, I explain the magic word is discretion. Discretion, not in the sense of being discreet and polite, but discretion in the sense of having the power to make decisions. In, in the, the business world, there are some CEOs who have the power to make decisions. CEOs of perfume companies, or a friend of mine whom I spoke to on the phone an hour ago, is the CEO of a company that makes teenage t-shirts. If you guess what's going to catch on with the teenagers, you will be very rich and successful, as my friend is. Whereas if you are the CEO of a railroad, once you have a railroad, it's there for the next seven years.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  The CEO of a public utility, they're tightly, you don't have much discretion. So in short, answering your question is leaders can make a difference. One, if they have discretion, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Secondly, if they're uniquely qualified. Suresh Kama was uniquely qualified. Rachel Carson was uniquely qualified. Most leaders, one cannot argue that they're uniquely qualified. They may make a difference if they want to do something that the public does not want to do, but they are sufficiently persuasive that they get the public to do it. Franklin Roosevelt getting the US prepared for the World War II that the United States did not want.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Charles de Gaulle getting the French prepared to pull out of Algeria, which the French did not want. And still, another difference is if, if you've got lots of good colleagues who want to do the same thing. Clement Attlee, the prime minister who followed Winston Churchill, he had very able colleagues. And if Clement Attlee had died in bed the next morning, one of his colleagues would have done the same thing. Whereas Suresh Kama or Rachel Carson, if she or he had died, there weren't colleagues standing around ready to do the same thing. So those are examples that there are circumstances under which a leader can make a difference, and the circumstances under which a leader doesn't make a difference.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  And, and there it is to frustrate you and anybody else who interests me, but it's true, interviews me, but it's true.

• 1:24:30Sean Carroll?

  I love it. No, I think that sometimes we have to enjoy and appreciate the complexities of the world. That's not a bad lesson to have. So Jared Diamond, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's been a real, a real pleasure to talk with you.

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