Speaker 1People 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, there are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations because there are different ways to be an effective leader.
Speaker 2Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the University of Michigan. 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 Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings. We discuss political leaders, religious leaders, leaders in business, and in sports. Today, you're going to hear a lot of myths dispelled, including the common myth that charisma is requisite for successful leadership. And we discuss a lot of incredible biology. For instance, why observing birds, yes, birds, because of their reliance on sight and sound, makes them one of the best windows into understanding human behavior and human nature. We also discuss Jared himself, because, as you'll soon see, he is an incredible and very unusual human being. We discuss his obsessive curiosity that's been there since childhood, and how it's migrated from topic to topic, book to book, paper to paper, and what his process is for taking hard questions into the laboratory and going out into the wild, literally, to observe things in their natural state and then bring back all of that knowledge in a form that is unlike any other scientist or writer. So what follows is a discussion with an absolute luminary. 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. It's a pleasure to be with you. Delighted. 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 prophets, phonetically the same, but prophets as in making profits, and prophets 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, present, and future. First, I would like to know, what is a prophet, P-R-O-P-H-E-T?
Speaker 1Prophet 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 capitalizing, catching prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings. I don't care about whether they prophesy the future, it was simply my word for religious
Speaker 2leaders. 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. We can go into the middle of the continuum if you want as well. Your book starts off talking about Hitler, which for the vast majority of people alive, is considered one of the darkest. It's actually one of the darkest, darkest, darkest, darkest, darkest, darkest leaders ever. Tell us about Hitler and what you learned about him that perhaps can inform how we think about leadership more generally.
Speaker 1I 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 dated thing that I can remember was the first photo that the U.S. Army took. It was a photo that was released of dead American soldiers. It was a famous cover of Life magazine, two American soldiers dead face down on Buna Gona 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 of my family, of course, disappeared in the Holocaust. I married into a Polish family. My wife's parents came to the U.S. in 1948. My wife's mother had survived Auschwitz, various members of my wife's family did not survive, and so my life and Marie's life had been formed under the shadow of Hitler. On top of that, then, there were leaders, nonpolitical 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 isotopes. The pump broke. It flooded my lab. It flooded the lab below my lab. That was not a good choice of a lab to flood. It was the lab of Lord Adrian, who was the father-in-law of my thesis advisor and who was the master of my college. The next morning, the chair of the physiology department, Sir Brian Matthews, called me and I thought I was going to be expelled. Instead, he said, you know, that was sloppy, don't do that again. So there was a leader who could have escaped. 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 harm. Those are the reasons for my personal interest in leaders, starting with the question of Hitler. If there had not been Hitler, would my family in Eastern Europe and would Marie's family still be alive?
Speaker 2Trevor Burrus: How close were we to there not being an adult Hitler?
Speaker 1Peter Van Doren: They were close. 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, and the truck hit 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 last year of the war, Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who became disillusioned, attempted to kill Hitler. He brought a small suitcase with a bomb into the. conference room at Wolf's Lair. He sat down next to Hitler, put the suitcase, which he had primed the bomb, he put the suitcase just under Hitler's foot, and the bomb went off. But just before the bomb went off, Hitler leaned forward. The result was that four other people in the room got killed. Hitler's eardrum was blown out. Hitler was seriously wounded. Everybody was not killed. But if Hitler had not leaned forward, that was 1944, would various members of my wife's family have survived? So those are reasons 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.
Speaker 2Trevor Burrus: Was there anyone else that could have accomplished what Hitler accomplished?
Speaker 1Peter Van Doren: Historians argue about that. This illustrates. It illustrates the difficulties in figuring out whether leaders make a difference. The traditional method of historians 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 others. anti-Semites in Europe, not just in Germany, but in Poland, but Hitler, All those other anti-Semites killed Jews one by one. Hitler was the only one who got the idea of doing it on an industrial scale. Without Hitler, there probably would not have been a Holocaust. He was also brilliant at deceiving people, 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 a difference, that without Hitler, there might not have been a World War II, and there would not have been a Holocaust. Most historians tend to believe that leaders don't make a difference. But in the case of Hitler, most historians would argue that 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 was true, but that there wouldn't have been any difference if Hitler had not been a leader. So those are the arguments for thinking that Hitler did make a difference. Those are the arguments about Hitler, but that illustrates the weakness of the traditional biographic method. 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.
Speaker 2Who in your mind is the most unlikely leader that became a spectacularly successful leader, either toward positive or destructive ends?
Speaker 1There are many, many candidates for that. There's one candidate, the first, having been born in 1937, I grew up under Roosevelt, but the first American president 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 was a senator from Missouri, undistinguished. He had. He had become a senator through dishonest shenanigans. He was so insignificant that Roosevelt never met with him once Truman became vice president. 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 realized that Truman was courageous. He didn't care whether people hated him. He made courageous decisions. The Berlin airlift, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War, which people hated him for, firing General MacArthur, which people hated him for. 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 his decisions.
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Speaker 1I would say no, and this illustrates a broad point. Perhaps the communist generalization is that leaders have to be charismatic. Nonsense. 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.
Speaker 2I'm getting the sense that in Europe, 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, 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? How did cultures evolve, et cetera, 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, you know, be satisfied? And I'm gonna set up a parallel with something that we're going to look at later, which is birdwatching. I mean, every bird is different, but every bird belongs to a particular category and it 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? -
Speaker 1There are generalizations that I came to in writing, writing about leaders. But I would say 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 the role of individuals? And my answer to that is no. "Guns, Germs, and Steel," is about patterns of history on the continents 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 jumpstarting, quote, civilization. The Fertile Crescent jumpstarted 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, and Steel, there's nothing at all about individuals. Whereas my book about leadership is about what people have done during my lifetime, usually on local scales. And so it is about individuals, whereas Guns, Germs, and Steel was not at all about. 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, and Steel.
Speaker 2Is 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?
Speaker 1In 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, it's 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, it's all, it's all self-indulgent. I haven't contributed to any of those four areas. Now, in the epilogue of the book, I do ask, what are the areas of the areas that are waiting for exploration by the method of natural experiments? And I mean 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, I'm hoping that in the future, people will apply these questions people will apply these questions people will apply these questions of leadership to things of leadership to things of leadership to things that involve me personally, that involve me personally, that involve me personally, particularly music and science, particularly music and science, particularly music and science, but that's for the future.
Speaker 2But that's for the future. You mentioned this story You mentioned this story You mentioned this story about flooding the laboratory with, about flooding the laboratory with, about flooding the laboratory with, I should point out, I should point out, I should point out, I heard you say radioactive isotope water. I heard you say radioactive isotope water. What is your takeaway from What is your takeaway from What is your takeaway from that particular professor's that particular professor's that particular professor's response and has it made you more response and has it made you more response and has it made you more forgiving of other people's mistakes?
Speaker 1forgiving of other people's mistakes? I've not been one to jump on I've not been one to jump on I've not been one to jump on other people for their mistakes. other people for their mistakes. Well, I've made plenty of mistakes. I've had very close calls myself. I've done things that could have I've done things that could have I've done things that could have ended my career on the spot, ended my career on the spot, ended my career on the spot, so I'm not inclined to blame so I'm not inclined to blame so I'm not inclined to blame other people for their mistakes. I recall a biography of J. Robert I recall a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer mentioned that Oppenheimer mentioned that Oppenheimer mentioned that Oppenheimer, he committed theft, Oppenheimer, he committed theft, Oppenheimer, he committed theft, and he could easily have been and he could easily have been and he could easily have been fired and his career might have fired and his career might have fired and his career might have been ended, but the theft was been ended, but the theft was been ended, but the theft was overlooked, and so he went on to overlooked, and so he went on to overlooked, and so he went on to develop his career. develop his career. develop his career. It's interesting how, when we are It's interesting how, when we are It's interesting how, when we are very low on a hierarchical very low on a hierarchical
Speaker 2very low on a hierarchical ladder, like in academia, in its ladder, like in academia, in its ladder, like in academia, in its traditional days, anyway, that traditional days, anyway, that traditional days, anyway, that people hold tremendous power, people hold tremendous power, people hold tremendous power, obviously, to impact us and obviously, to impact us and obviously, to impact us and whether we move forward or not. whether we move forward or not. But it's always reassuring when But it's always reassuring when But it's always reassuring when something like the forgiveness something like the forgiveness something like the forgiveness of this professor, if people can of this professor, if people can of this professor, if people can hear that, because I think a hear that, because I think a hear that, because I think a lot of people associate powerful lot of people associate powerful lot of people associate powerful leadership with-- here I'm leadership with-- here I'm leadership with-- here I'm generalizing again-- with a sort generalizing again-- with a sort generalizing again-- with a sort of a lack of tolerance for of a lack of tolerance for of a lack of tolerance for imperfection, lack of imperfection, lack of imperfection, lack of tolerance for things that could tolerance for things that could tolerance for things that could threaten the whole department in threaten the whole department in threaten the whole department in this case. So it's a very sweet this case. So it's a very sweet story on the one hand, but I story on the one hand, but I story on the one hand, but I imagine it didn't happen a imagine it didn't happen a imagine it didn't happen a second time. There's also that, second time. There's also that, right? right? right? For 36 years, I was professor For 36 years, I was professor For 36 years, I was professor of physiology at UCLA Medical of physiology at UCLA Medical of physiology at UCLA Medical School doing laboratory School doing laboratory School doing laboratory experiments, and so I had experiments, and so I had experiments, and so I had graduate students and postdocs, graduate students and postdocs, graduate students and postdocs, and quite a few of the and quite a few of the
Speaker 1and quite a few of the graduate students and postdocs graduate students and postdocs graduate students and postdocs screwed up. They made big screwed up. They made big mistakes. I remember my second mistakes. I remember my second graduate student, my department graduate student, my department graduate student, my department wanted to expel him because he wanted to expel him because he wanted to expel him because he didn't do well on an exam. I didn't do well on an exam. I convinced him that I wanted to convinced him that I wanted to convinced him that I wanted to do something with him, and I do something with him, and I do something with him, and I convinced my department to let convinced my department to let convinced my department to let him stay, and he turned out to him stay, and he turned out to him stay, and he turned out to be an outstanding researcher. be an outstanding researcher. A couple of others of my A couple of others of my A couple of others of my students had close calls, but students had close calls, but students had close calls, but again, I'm reminded how close I again, I'm reminded how close I again, I'm reminded how close I came myself to having my career came myself to having my career came myself to having my career ended. ended. ended. And people forgave me, and my And people forgave me, and my And people forgave me, and my career developed very well. career developed very well.
Speaker 2I would say so. I would say so.
Speaker 1I would say so. Since I was forgiven, it Since I was forgiven, it Since I was forgiven, it behooves me to forgive my behooves me to forgive my behooves me to forgive my students.
Speaker 2students. students. I love it, and I'm sure many I love it, and I'm sure many I love it, and I'm sure many people appreciate that. It's a people appreciate that. It's a very different picture of very different picture of very different picture of academia than I think most academia than I think most academia than I think most people get. So thank you for people get. So thank you for that. Religious leaders. Who in that. Religious leaders. Who in that. Religious leaders. Who in your mind stood out as important your mind stood out as important your mind stood out as important enough to feature prominently in enough to feature prominently in enough to feature prominently in the book?
Speaker 1the book? the book? In the book, I have two In the book, I have two In the book, I have two chapters on religious leaders. chapters on religious leaders. The first chapter looks at three The first chapter looks at three The first chapter looks at three religious leaders in the 19th religious leaders in the 19th religious leaders in the 19th century United States because we century United States because we century United States because we got lots of detailed information got lots of detailed information got lots of detailed information about them. Joseph Smith, the about them. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion. founder of the Mormon religion. Anne Lee, the founder of Shakers. Jim Jones, the founder of Jim Jones, the founder of Jim Jones, the founder of Jonestown. So we have a lot of Jonestown. So we have a lot of information about them. The second information about them. The second chapter on religion looks at chapter on religion looks at chapter on religion looks at Jesus. We have minimal Jesus. We have minimal information about Jesus. We have information about Jesus. We have no contemporary information no contemporary information no contemporary information whatsoever about him. The first whatsoever about him. The first information that we have about him information that we have about him information that we have about him is the letters of St. Paul and is the letters of St. Paul and the Gospel according to St. Mark, the Gospel according to St. Mark, both of which follow his death by both of which follow his death by both of which follow his death by about 20 years. So there's no about 20 years. So there's no contemporary information about him contemporary information about him contemporary information about him with Jesus. Did Jesus make a with Jesus. Did Jesus make a difference? Well, if you read the difference? Well, if you read the New Testament, it talks about New Testament, it talks about New Testament, it talks about names, six other messiahs. names, six other messiahs. Jesus was not the only messiah. There were lots of people then There were lots of people then There were lots of people then who said, "I'm the messiah," and who said, "I'm the messiah," and who said, "I'm the messiah," and six of them are named in the New six of them are named in the New six of them are named in the New Testament. A couple of them were Testament. A couple of them were killed by the Romans. John the killed by the Romans. John the Baptist had his head cut off. Baptist had his head cut off. Jesus was killed, but this was Jesus was killed, but this was Jesus was killed, but this was the Western Roman Empire, the the Western Roman Empire, the the Western Roman Empire, the most powerful political entity most powerful political entity most powerful political entity of Western Eurasia, just the of Western Eurasia, just the of Western Eurasia, just the right place to found a major right place to found a major right place to found a major religion. Jesus, of course, could religion. Jesus, of course, could not foresee that 1,467 years could not foresee that 1,467 years could not foresee that 1,467 years after his death, Columbus would after his death, Columbus would after his death, Columbus would sail the ocean blue and launch sail the ocean blue and launch sail the ocean blue and launch the European conquest of the the European conquest of the the European conquest of the world, spreading the European world, spreading the European world, spreading the European religion. But the European religion. But the European religion was Christianity. Why? religion was Christianity. Why? Why? Because Christianity was the Because Christianity was the Because Christianity was the religion of the Western Roman religion of the Western Roman religion of the Western Roman Empire, the most powerful entity Empire, the most powerful entity Empire, the most powerful entity at that time. So if Jesus had at that time. So if Jesus had died 100 B.C., we wouldn't know died 100 B.C., we wouldn't know died 100 B.C., we wouldn't know about him. He was the right place about him. He was the right place and right time.
Speaker 2and right time. and right time. He definitely has the highest He definitely has the highest He definitely has the highest H-index of any religious leader.
Speaker 1H-index of any religious leader. The right place and the right The right place and the right The right place and the right time. And I believe that time. And I believe that Christianity is today the world Christianity is today the world Christianity is today the world religion with the largest number religion with the largest number religion with the largest number of adherents.
Speaker 2of adherents. of adherents. I know you try not to I know you try not to I know you try not to generalize, but is there generalize, but is there generalize, but is there anything specific about Jesus, anything specific about Jesus, anything specific about Jesus, the person that we do know with the person that we do know with the person that we do know with almost certainty or with almost certainty or with almost certainty or with certainty that spoke to his certainty that spoke to his certainty that spoke to his effectiveness? Or was it, you effectiveness? Or was it, you said right place, right time, said right place, right time, said right place, right time, but that seems necessary but not but that seems necessary but not but that seems necessary but not sufficient.
Speaker 1sufficient. sufficient. That's the question of the Dead Sea That's the question of the Dead Sea That's the question of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scrolls. Scrolls. Why was world religion founded by Why was world religion founded by Why was world religion founded by Jesus and not by the leader of Jesus and not by the leader of Jesus and not by the leader of the Essenes? the Essenes? the Essenes? Well, there are a couple of things. One, Jesus' message and One, Jesus' message and One, Jesus' message and personal qualities. personal qualities. personal qualities. He had a universal message for He had a universal message for He had a universal message for all people. all people. all people. It was not just a message for It was not just a message for It was not just a message for But his message was not addressed to But his message was not addressed to But his message was not addressed to just the Jews. just the Jews. just the Jews. It was a universal message. Of those religious leaders of Of those religious leaders of Of those religious leaders of the Roman Empire at that time, the Roman Empire at that time, the Roman Empire at that time, that was a big thing in his that was a big thing in his that was a big thing in his favor. favor. favor. And another thing in his favor was And another thing in his favor was And another thing in his favor was that a religion needs not only that a religion needs not only that a religion needs not only a charismatic founder, but it a charismatic founder, but it a charismatic founder, but it needs a great organizer. needs a great organizer. In some cases, the organizer In some cases, the organizer In some cases, the organizer and the charismatic founder and the charismatic founder and the charismatic founder are the same person. are the same person. are the same person. Mohammed was a great organizer Mohammed was a great organizer Mohammed was a great organizer and also charismatic. and also charismatic. The Mahdi of the Sudan was a The Mahdi of the Sudan was a The Mahdi of the Sudan was a brilliant organizer and brilliant brilliant organizer and brilliant brilliant organizer and brilliant general, also a brilliant Jesus died too early. He was not the organizer. It was St. Paul. 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.
Speaker 2And Columbus, obviously, was able to propagate his ideas far, as you pointed out, with the desire to still avoid generalizations. The picture I'm getting is that you need a leader, you need an organizer. Sometimes the leader is the organizer, but oftentimes. Sometimes 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 and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize. It's very common that there's this pairing, and having known David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel a bit, 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. Are they effective in getting escape velocity on their leadership, their message?
Speaker 1I 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 a 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 false. It's violent, so that often new religions have had to defend themselves, have had to have generals. For example, the Mahdi Mohammed was an outstanding general, as well as organizer and charismatic. The Mahdi of the Sudan, who established an empire in East Africa towards the end of the 19th century, great general. He led. Hundreds or thousands of Sudanese tribesmen 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 was Alan Hodgkin. Alan Hodgkin did a great scientist. He did not organize 50 people into a lab group. Alan Hodgkin, his strategy was to have one Ph.D. student at a time. While I was his Ph.D. student for three years, he did not have another Ph.D. 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 Edelman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on figuring out how antibodies work. Gerald Edelman had, I believe, something like 50 postdocs. And a friend of mine made a discovery that so-called Benz-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 Benz-Jones proteins before he had published, Gerald Edelman 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 out how antibodies operated. Gerald Edelman got the Nobel Prize. My friend did not get the Nobel Prize. But Gerald Edelman was a very effective organizer and fundraiser.
Speaker 2And big personality.
Speaker 1Yes. Yes. Yes. I met him on two occasions. Yes, he was a big personality.
Speaker 2He 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. And 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 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, the burned-down, 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 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?
Speaker 1Interesting 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 one hand, there's the leader. And on the other hand, there are the followers. Not everybody is a follower. There are some people who are prone to follow charismatic people. And there are other people, lots of people, who are not going to follow even the most charismatic people. Hitler. They were the Germans who followed Hitler, were persuaded by Hitler. But the Nazis never got a majority in an election. The majority of Germans were not persuaded by Hitler. Jim Jones of Jonestown. Notorious for founding a colony in Guyana. And the colony ended in the largest mass suicide in American history. 900, 931 people drank, punched, poisoned with cyanide. But Jim Jones, he can't be written off as a crazy. He led the desegregation of Indianapolis. He attracted people by the noble ideals of the church that 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 temperament was not very good. The people's temperament, 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.
Speaker 2I didn't realize he led the desegregation of Indianapolis.
Speaker 1If 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 the Indianapolis church. He was appointed one of the housing commissioners for the Indianapolis church. Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. My parents voted three times for Roosevelt and once they voted against Roosevelt. My parents and other Roosevelt were not crazy sick people. And Winston Churchill, the people who voted for Winston Churchill were not crazy sick people. In that case, one cannot look to the pathology or the strange qualities of their followers as one can in the case of Jim Jones.
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Speaker 1Jim Jones certainly did not deny God and did not claim to be superior to God. Here's another one. Are there traits shared by leaders? And I mentioned that there are different ways to be an effective leader, charisma, da, da, da, da, da, da. In, I think it was the third chapter of my book, I have a table in which I pull together 22 outstanding political leaders of the period from World War II onwards. And I ask myself, what generalizations can we reach about these 22 leaders? The 22 leaders, the obvious, obvious Canada. You can argue about them, but Stalin, Anwar Sadat, Mussolini, Hitler, et cetera, et cetera. I ask 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 South Africa. He was, I think, in his 80s. And he retired voluntarily as prime minister. Then Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore. Served as prime minister. Might 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, Anwar 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 politics, once you've become a powerful leader and you've come to the conclusion that you are an effective, powerful leader, you are very unlikely to step down voluntarily. Only two out of 22 did it. So that's a generalization that I have not anticipated.
Speaker 2Yeah. I suppose it's a lifestyle hit, too. Nobody wants to go backwards in terms of their comforts. But I am surprised that some people have the vigor to continue to occupy these very high demand spots, despite aging and fatiguing. You clearly don't slow, 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?
Speaker 1I learned Italian. Italian was the last of my 13 languages. I learned Italian-- Just 13, yeah. --when I was 61 years old.
Speaker 2I read Italian every day.
Speaker 1All my leisure reading is in Italian. I don't do leisure reading in English. And once a week, I have a two-hour Italian conversation with my Italian professor, who's a professor at USC. What inspired you to learn 13 languages? Is it fun for you? And/or do you enjoy the challenge as a student? Well, I think that the first thing that comes to mind is Italian. I mean, I think that the first thing that comes to mind is Italian.
Speaker 2My mother was a talented linguist. I just loved learning languages.
Speaker 1I've always loved learning languages. I've always loved languages.
Speaker 2puzzle of it. You love the application of it, given that once you learned Italian, you still have these conversations in Italian for a couple 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. And from that, we're going to extract some deeper understanding. 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 it and you can divide everything right down to the. Subdivisions of the mitochondria, if you want, right? So you have to pick 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 stuff in the world and said, that's crazy. Why do they organize it that way? Maybe we should look at it through the most. Detailed lens. And from that, extract clarity.
Speaker 1I've been that way only since age three. My mother, who was a teacher and loved teaching, mom taught me to read when I was three years old. And so I began keeping a notebook. I've still got my three-year-old 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. It's 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 biology out of making lists. After my PhD, I was a membrane biologist. And among my contributions to membrane biology, I did the largest study ever carried out of the permeability of biological memory to uncharged molecules, non-electrolytes. I and 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 are branch non-electrolytes. There are non-branch non-electrolytes. And there are ones with oxygen groups. And there are ones with sulfur groups. So there's lots of detail. 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 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 foray names, the Mopisena, the Pasquakiyama, the Kenmamitoto, the Suwanataba. Sometimes I'll recite them by their Latin names, Cerachornis pampoensis, Cerachornis perspiculatus, Cerachornis nueus. I just love making lists. But one of my teachers, one of my influential teachers, Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr loved making lists. And he and I spent 30 years preparing a book together on how to make lists. On the birds of northern Melanesia, the islands east of New Guinea, Ernst and I were very compatible. Both of us loved making lists. Whenever a question would come up, Ernst would say, let's make a list. And he would make a list, and I would make a list. And then we would go over that list, the list of all the mountain birds of northern Melanesia. What generalizations are there about the mountain bird? 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.
Speaker 2So 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 will say, based on spending a lot of time thinking about the names of and the connectivity of different brain structures, often there's a way of naming things in a field that actually tells you a lot about the functionality. Like in neuroscience, for instance, the first name in retinogeniculate, it tells you what the origin structure and the recipient structure are. So the names actually matter. They tell you a lot more than just this is different 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 have their own unique value that's independent from that?
Speaker 1The names are the anchor for a lot of information. When I recite at night, "Saracornis norhiusi." "Saracornis norhiusi," the large scrub wren. What about it? Well, it's the larger of two birds in an altitudinal sequence. It's the larger of two coexisting species, very similar, so similar that the Pascoechiapii and the Mabasena, I couldn't tell them apart until New Guineans explained to me the differences in their behavior. So there's a lot of information that's associated with the name. In addition, the name itself has it, "Saracornis." It means that that bird belongs to the genus Saracornis. And in the genus Saracornis is also Saracornis virgartus, which is the low elevation equivalent of Saracornis norhiusi. But there's also Saracornis perspiculatus, which is the small-bodied scrub wren that shares the same altitudinal range as norhiusi. So there's information that goes along with the name.
Speaker 2In 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?
Speaker 1Basically, yes. I mean, I've always been interested in lots of things. I was fortunate to go to a secondary school that gave me options to study lots of things. My secondary school, although I expected to go into science, my secondary school had a great history teacher, better than all the history teachers I had had at Harvard College. Wonderful 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 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 wrapped 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 had become a birdwatcher at age seven. And when I came back to Boston after getting my PhD, in my first summer, I and a college classmate, the college classmate who was a great birdwatcher, 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. 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 eventually closed down in the year 2002. Why? Because 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. And finally, with great difficulty, I got UCLA to transfer me from being professor of gallbladder physiology in the medical school to being professor of geography in the college. I've still kept up the two careers in history and geography. At the same time as I was writing my book on leaders, at the same time, I've also been writing papers on my work on New Guinea birds. I 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 Wani Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. And because I'm 89 years old, I have to figure, 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? So that's what I want to do for the remaining 10 years of my life.
Speaker 2I have to say that despite having colleagues who have a lot of interest, it's very rare to encounter somebody who's been successful in several different domains of serious scientific exploration, much less writing books about them as well. 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, and gradually. And maybe this is also not to pry into your personal life, but it's one thing to decide, well, 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, do you have tenure? How are we going to pay the bills? So I imagine there would be a lot of questions about that. There's likely support, or maybe you're just very defiant and you just follow your curiosity.
Speaker 1There were the career issues and there were the issues of interest. The issues of interest were that ever since I was three years old, I've been interested in lots of stuff. And I realized in retrospect that among my life crises, one of my life crises was after I got my PhD, realizing with horror. 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, but I was fortunate that my postdoctoral fellowship was with the 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, you know, I could do anything. 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. 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. Sherm Mellencoff, wonderful person. He was offering me a job in the physio. I told Sherm, yes, but I'm interested in New Guinea birds and you got to understand that I intend to. I'm. I've spent three months every summer working on New Guinea birds and I want to continue my work on New Guinea birds. 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. Sherm Mellencoff said, Jared, UCLA Medical School is interested in New Guinea birds. I'm going to give you $5,000 every year to spend studying New Guinea birds. And so he tolerated it and he made it possible for me. I'm then fortunate that I had a dean who permitted it. As for my wife, Marie, Marie had no problems whatsoever with it. When I met Marie, I was already working in New Guinea. In fact, the development of our relationship, 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.
Speaker 2Yeah, it raises it. That's a very interesting feature of adventurous living, much less researching and living 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 can get a cheeseburger from McDonald's anywhere in the world now, and perhaps that's true. But have you always. Have you always been willing to put your physical comfort on the line in order to learn? I mean, learning languages is hard. Putting yourself into a jungle environment where there's all sorts of diseases, where there's political and social unrest. 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 has that landed with you?
Speaker 1Yeah. To work in. In New Guinea, it's a necessary evil. It's not. Until I went to New Guinea, I. When I was in Peru, 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. It was miserable. So, yes, I experienced physical misery in Peru. In New Guinea, to do anything in New Guinea, there's lots of physical memory, misery. The food is sweet potatoes and rice, three meals a day. Being in the jungle, I'm getting bitten by scrub mites. My first year in New Guinea, I ended up with dysentery. Which the doctors at Harvard couldn't cure. Remained with me for a year. My third year in New Guinea, I ended up with malaria. Climbing mountains in New Guinea. Being in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the time. Occasionally, like maybe once in three months, I can sit down at campsite and look out and say, my God, that's beautiful. But the rest of the time. I'm physically miserable, and I'm having to deal with New Guineans who have their own ideas about what to do in life. Being in New Guinea, it's uncomfortable, but it's fascinating. The fascination of the birds, of figuring out what's the difference between the Mabassain and the Pascua Kiabi.
Speaker 2Let'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 co-solve the structure of DNA. So he went a different way. And then the late, also late, Murray Gilman, who discovered the quark as, 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 after these big questions, like entire societies, leadership, the structure of DNA, Gilman, 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 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-capped 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 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 is it? What does it inform you about, and what does it celebrate in you?
Speaker 1What 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. smell. One can't rat watch. Yes, you can watch antelopes, but you don't go around watching rats. If you want to understand rats, you have to have a good sense of smell, you catch them in traps. But birds you can watch. And so most of what we know about ecology and evolutionary biology and biogeography and behavior has been learned first on birds and has been learned in most detail about birds and then that knowledge we can apply to other animals. So the things that I've written about birds, lots about ecology, lots about how birds divide ecological niches, lots about evolution, how bird species evolve in New Guinea, how do you get new species in an uninterrupted mountain range, biogeography, the distribution of plants and animals around the world began especially with the distribution of birds and then mammals and other things. The animals easiest to observe are birds. So when you say, what can we learn about birds? An honest answer, we can learn everything about birds and everything in the biological world is easier to learn from birds than about other animals.
Speaker 2So we can learn anything about birds. An honest answer, we can learn anything about birds and everything in the biological world is easier to learn from birds. An honest answer, we can learn anything about birds.
Speaker 1What can we learn about birds? Everything. A bird song. It's a communication. What are birds trying to communicate? So birds are singing. Why are they singing? What information are they conveying in the 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 titmice. If they see a hawk, there's a call note, just a small pssh, pssh, pssh, pssh. A simple call note. 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 two and two. So there's a lot of information in bird songs. That then has inspired similar studies, especially in monkeys. There was a husband and wife couple, Seifoff and Chaney, who were at UCLA and moved to Pennsylvania. They did wonderful studies on fervent monkeys. Fervent monkeys make grunts. And Seifoff and Chaney thought, some of these grunts sound a little different. And so they started recording the grunts. And playing the grunts. 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 realized that the different grunts function as words. There's a grunt that means eagle. And when a monkey, fervent monkey, comes up with a grunt for eagle, the monkeys look up. And there's another grunt that means python. When fervents hear python, they look down in the grass. There's another grunt that means leopard. When they hear leopard, they scramble up a tree. So this is an example of the information conveyed by sounds, first in birds, and then in monkeys.
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Speaker 1Yes, and graduate students, when they were working with me, I negotiated with them to make sure that they would do a project that interested me and interested them. It had to be a project that interested me because I worked hard to find the funds and I could take only two or three students at a time. A student would be with me for three or four years. 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 had been told that for postdocs, it was the norm in the department, he alleged, was 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. He was an interesting guy and I was taken aback. Okay, you can do your own. He did a project of his own as well as the project with me, but that's the only time that I have had a student do a project that did not interest me. Otherwise, the projects have always been projects that interested both me and the student. And that's good for the student 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.
Speaker 2It's clear because you've told us and your career demonstrates this that you have had and maintain a lot of interest in the project. the fact that some pets, some things, topics 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? 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?
Speaker 1Absolutely 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, because I knew that perfectly well. I knew that perfectly well. 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. A 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, in the first, ornithological explorations of several of them, the most detailed explorations of the rest. If I don't write that up, that knowledge will die with me, because those mountain ranges are difficult to get into. 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 on only one mountain range? I've got that unique data set, and I want to do a synthesis of those 10 mountain ranges, and I want to do a synthesis of those 10 mountain ranges, and I want to do a synthesis of those 10 mountain ranges. 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 love the music of Bach. I sang in Boston's Handel and Haydn Society. I sang in Cambridge England's Musical Society. Benjamin Britten came and did the premiere of his Cantata Academica when I was singing in the Cambridge Chorus. 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 or later, 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 at the rate of about one a week. Last night, I re-listened to cantatas 61 and 62. Next will come cantata 63. At the rate I'm going, it will take me maybe three or four years to get to know all of the Bach cantata. But that's something that I would like to do. But I'm very conscious now of the amount of time left. And I've had that consciousness only in the past few years.
Speaker 2Are there any things that you used to do out of feelings of obligation that you no longer do that allow you more time for the things in the. The people that are important to you? And that you wish you had perhaps permitted yourself to do earlier?
Speaker 1My first thought is no. By and large, I've done the things that I've enjoyed doing. Now, of course, there are things that are not pleasure that have to be done in life. 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 tax as much as most other people would do it. Income tax has to be done and it 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 shopping. I excuse myself by. And Marie knows that I spend the equivalent of a couple 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.
Speaker 2I 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 Kahn, is still on the faculty at Stanford. Paul wrote, of course, The Population Bomb. Paul and Sandra wrote the book, Jaws, with, I think, had a foreword by you and maybe an introduction from Bob Sapolsky about 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. 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, 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.
Speaker 1He was certainly correct that, that the, 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, the third, the third risk is, of course, the, the risk of running out of resources, destroying our resources, which we are doing at a, at a rapid rate. 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, is the number of people, but the consumption rate per person. Consumption rate per person in the first world has, 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. Paul and his wife, Anne, the book, The Population Bomb, called attention to the, to the danger of population growth. And one can now add to population growth multiplied by consumption per person. Paul predicted big dangers within the next few decades. He predicted widespread starvation. If you look at his Wikipedia entry, um, so here's, here's one of the world's great modern scientists. And his, the God, damn Wikipedia, his Wikipedia entry instead harps on his book, The Population Bomb, and says it didn't prove correct. Well, out of the 9 billion people in the world today, um, how many of them are underfed and starving? Are they starving to death? Nope, 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 right, but he got it right in a broader sense than the idiots who attack him are willing to admit.
Speaker 2Happy to hear you say this. Long been a fan of his work and him, and I agree. And Jaws is a wonderful book, and I think the Population Bomb still has great, there's real value in reading it, even if the specific statements, as you 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?
Speaker 1Am I into sports? Well, I work out.
Speaker 2Yeah, you look very healthy. Is that an important part of your intellectual rigor as well?
Speaker 1I've always been physically active. I began weightlifting in college. I ran for years. The day that my wife was in labor, was about to deliver our twins, I was going running, and I was so excited that she was about to deliver twins that instead of putting my lunch and lunch, and lunch in the refrigerator and my shoes on the floor, I put my running shoes in the refrigerator and my lunch on the floor. So I still work out several days a week. Being physically active is a big part of my life. I get satisfaction out of it.
Speaker 2And I think for somebody to do physical exercise nowadays with the intention of building and preserving both their mind and body 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 athletic endeavors was kind of a theme. It was like people played sports, right? But working out was sort of the stuff of like military jocks and bodybuilders and running less so, right? But I find that all the scientists that I know that have had very long successful careers and are still going strong, I think that's a big part of my life. And I think that's a big part of my life. 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.
Speaker 1Right. The great Harvard organic chemist, Woodward, R.B. Woodward, who won two Nobel prizes. Woodward did not do any physical exercise whatsoever. He didn't want to spend any time doing anything except organic chemistry. And of course, he died at an early age.
Speaker 2In the lab, presumably. I think in bed. Okay. Well, better than in one office 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?
Speaker 1I explored leaders in sports for the same reason that business school professors do a lot of their, much of their research on sports outcomes. In fact, I would say that much or maybe even most of the research on sports outcomes is done by business school professors. The reason being that business school professors are, of course, interested in business outcomes. But business outcomes, they're hard to measure. CEOs tend to be secretive. Businesses may not publish their results or they publish them every five years. So the data for the business world is limited. But in sports, games are played every week or a couple of times a week. The results of the games are announced. The coach is there on the sidelines, usually jumping up and down, screaming. The players are well-known. Sports is on television. The result is that the methods that business school professors have developed for analyzing seeds, the methods that business school professors have developed for analyzing seeds, and for analyzing the business world are often developed in sports and they're debugged in sports. For example, in the business world, one of the main questions is, of course, how much of business success is due to the CEO? This is a loudly, CEOs say, I'm responsible for the success and therefore you ought to pay me billions of dollars because my company makes $100 billion. But because I'm responsible for that $100 billion 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 what's called ANOVA, analysis of variance. Analysis of variance applied to sports shows that roughly 15 to 30 percent of the variance in sports success is due to the coach, about another 30 percent is due to players, and about another 30 percent is due to the institutions. That's in sports. In the business world, it turns out that similarly, CEOs account for about 30 percent of ANOVA, and the individual company accounts for another, Procter & Gamble, very well-run company. It's been well-run for 150 years. Another 30 percent is due to the industry. Perfume companies and computer companies and teenage t-shirt companies tend to be very profitable, whereas departments of water and power tend to be unprofitable. Why? Because they're tightly regulated by governments. So ANOVA gets applied to the sports world and also to the business world. But in addition, coaches frequently get fired if they have a losing season. And CEOs get fired if the company has a poor year, 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? Because 70 percent of the variance in sports outcome is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO. If you're throwing dice, and you throw a dice and you get a one. And so you say to the person who threw the dice, you're a lousy dice thrower. You got one. I'm firing you. For statistical reasons, the chance is a five out of six that the next dice thrower will do better than one, 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. My university, UCLA, our athletic department is now $150 million in debt. Why? Because we fired all of our basketball coaches since John Wooden. And when we fire them, we have to buy out their contract. So buy out their contract, $5 million, $10 million, $15 million. Similarly, when you fire the CEO, the next CEO is likely to do better for the next year. So you have to buy out their contract. For random reasons, as with dice thrower, that illustrates why business school professors have gotten lots of their insights by analyzing sports.
Speaker 2How important is a coach's philosophy and, by extension, a CEO's philosophy on why we are doing this? We hear so much about this, that the why behind things is so important. But is that actually the case?
Speaker 1Yes, but rarely. So John Wooden is, 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, 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 that 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 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 was a model for life. That's unusual among coaches. Bill that Bill Belichick is a model for life. And what Bobby Knight—nobody says that Bobby Knight was a 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 train your players to jump higher. But you can't fake a philosophy of life as John Wooden did.
Speaker 2Is 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, 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 is humanity going? Politics aside, Steve Jobs clearly had a philosophy of creating beautiful things and design and technology being fused in a way that was highly accessible. He had a 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?
Speaker 1Bill Gates, I've met him and have had several lengthy conversations, and I like him. It's a 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. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2So forgive me. I should have mentioned Bezos.
Speaker 1Yeah. Jeff Bezos. Bezos, I met once. Of the leaders in the business world, I don't know that many of them. The one that I admire as a person is Chouinard of Patagonia. For him, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life. He emphasized having his staff have time off. He emphasized Patagonia being sustainable. He had the opportunity to acquire more cotton, produce more product. No, he chose not to acquire more cotton because he didn't want to overdevelop cotton agriculture. He is or was a full person, not just a leading business person. He did the first ascent of the most difficult face in the ocean. 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. Now, Steve Jobs certainly had a philosophy. He 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 a hundred products, he said, "We should produce four products, and the products should look nice, and they should be attractive, and they should be easy to handle. They should not be like the remote for my wife's and my TV to watch the World Soccer Cup. Our remote has, what, 47 buttons, and we had to call up our sons each time to tell us how to operate the remote. So Steve Jobs' devices don't have 47, but he had a philosophy, certainly, of products. I don't know whether he had a larger philosophy of life. As John Wooden certainly did.
Speaker 2So we talked about political leaders, religious leaders, sports. You said there's a fourth category that you cover in your book.
Speaker 1So we got political leaders, business leaders, sports leaders, and religious. Those are the four categories.
Speaker 2And business and sport seem to kind of interdigitate a bit, right? It sounds like.
Speaker 1The connection between business studies and sports studies, I think, has been especially tight. But it's also the case that 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 studying the success of leaders looks at leaders in politics. But it also looks at leaders in business and leaders, but it also looks at leaders in politics. 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 in wartime, democratic leaders are given more power. So the business school professors have also applied their methods to politics as well.
Speaker 2Many 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. 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 structured in how you go about that. You didn't just try to do everything at once, and you clearly succeeded. You succeeded in each of these domains. I'm sure there were challenges along the way. But what would you, if anything, would you like to pass along to people of any age?
Speaker 1I would begin by saying, "Do what you enjoy." But it's got to be broader than that. A friend of mine, the great biologist Tom Lovejoy, now unfortunately dead. Tom told me 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 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 live your life this way. You got to iron your shirts." But when I was a graduate, I didn't iron my shirts. I'm now someone who irons my shirts, but as far as I'm concerned, if anyone tells me, "Jared, spend your time ironing your shirts," go to hell. There are other things that I want to do with my time, and whether 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? Yup. Am I doing something that's. That's good for the world? Yeah. I've spent a lot of time designing the national park system for Indonesia and New Guinea, designing the principles for national parks in general. 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 live better lives and not to mess up the world. I've done things that I enjoy. I've done things that I'm good at. There are some things that I wanted to do, but I discovered that I was 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. I could not block out the sound of the playing. I could not do the downbeat before the players play. And I tried conducting, 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 conduct an orchestra, although I would have loved doing that. But I've ended up 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.
Speaker 2I agree on 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. them out of your busy schedule to come share with us and educate us. I'm super excited about prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings. Today's conversation only makes me more excited about it. I will say that your father, despite his encouragement to you to continue and become a biologist and not a translator, with all due respect, he partially failed because for me and for millions of other people, you've become a translator of ideas that we would have never encountered or considered. 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.
Speaker 1Thank you. I've enjoyed a lot. I'm talking with you, you know, for, you know, yourself for, for writing book. One does the interviews and podcasts and interviewers differ. They're not all the same. Some interviewers are better prepared than other interviewers. Some interviews know more about the subject than other interviews. It's a real pleasure to do a conversation with you. It's a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you.
Speaker 2Thank 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 work, please visit www.drjareddiamond.com. Thank you. 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 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 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. 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 and you can get a free copy of the podcast. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, 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.
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