Passion Struck with John R. Miles - World-Renowned Historian: When Leaders Actually Change History | Jared Diamond - EP 815

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

What makes someone a great leader? Is it talent? Timing? Character? Circumstance? Or simply being the right person in the right place at the right moment? Today, John R. Miles sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and bestselling author Jared Diamond to explore one of the biggest questions in his new book, Profits, Profits, Profits, Coaches and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? After spending decades studying civilizations, geography, human societies, and why nations succeed or collapse, Diamond has turned his attention to leadership. And his answer challenges the way we usually think about great leaders. Some leaders genuinely change history. Others recognize an opportunity that history has already created. And some may be talented, successful, and famous—but would not have made much difference if someone else had been in their place. In this conversation, Jared explains how he uses history as a series of “natural experiments” to separate the impact of a leader from the circumstances surrounding them. You’ll learn: When leaders actually matter Why some leaders are uniquely qualified to change history—and most aren't How timing and circumstance can determine whether a leader succeeds The difference between creating an opportunity and recognizing one Why Churchill was a great wartime leader but far less effective in peacetime What Harry Truman can teach us about leadership and courage Why founders can have an outsized impact on the institutions they leave behind How the “Hamlet test” reveals whether someone was truly indispensable What Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and John Wooden reveal about distinctive leadership Why leaders should be judged partly by what happens after they leave Why leadership is about more than techniques—and why philosophy matters And Jared shares one of his most important lessons for leaders: Stop looking for the one most important thing. Great leadership, he argues, is about getting the many important things right. This is a conversation about leadership, history, circumstance, and legacy—but ultimately, it raises a question every leader should ask: If you disappeared tomorrow, what would actually be different because you were here? Click for the Full Shownotes Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/. Take the 90-second diagnostic to see if you're disappearing.Explore the Show: https://passionstruck.com/starter-packs/. New to Passion Struck? Start with the best episodes curated for you.Connect with JohnWebsite: https://johnrmiles.comBook John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Children’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.Passion Struck — #1 Alternative Health Podcast. 85M+ downloads.DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What's the most important quality of a great leader? Is it courage, vision, integrity, intelligence? Most leadership is built around helping us find that one thing, the secret trait technique that separates great leaders from everyone else. But when I asked Jared Diamond that question, his answer caught me completely off guard. He said, the biggest mistake leader, can make is searching for one most important thing. Take a listen to this. If a couple who are about

to get married ask, what's the secret of a successful marriage? I know that couple is at risk getting divorced because to have a successful marriage, you've got to get 37 things right. You have to agree about sex and money and children and religion. And if you think that one thing is most important, your marriage is going to end up in disaster. Similarly, if a leader asks, what is the one most important thing. I would say the one most important thing is to stop looking for the one most important thing to focus on getting 37 things right. It's your friend John and welcome to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a long-time listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want,

but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Passionstruck. I'm so glad you're here. This is episode 815, and today we're continuing our new series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Earlier this week, Angela Duckworth challenged us to think differently about human potential. Her message was simple. Who we become isn't shaped only by what's inside us. Our situations matter. The people around us, the environments we're in, the circumstances we find ourselves facing. But that raises another

question. What happens when the situation itself creates the opportunity for someone to lead? And how do we know whether a leader truly changed the outcome or whether someone else in the same circumstances might have done exactly the same thing? That's the fascinating question at the heart of today's conversation. Joining me today is Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and one of the most influential thinkers in the world. His new book, Prophets, Prophets, Coaches and Kings explores leadership, through an extraordinary range of examples, from business and politics to sports and religion. And Jared asked a question that sounds simple

or turns out to be incredibly difficult to answer. When the leaders actually matter? In this conversation, we explore why there's no single formula for great leadership. Why circumstances can matter as much as the individual and why some people rise the moments that no one ever expected them to handle. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording. We tend to look at great leaders after the fact and assume we should have seen their potential

all along. Jared's work challenges that assumption. Sometimes you can't know what someone is capable of until they're confronted with a moment that demands more of them than anyone expected. And maybe that's true for all of us. because at some point, each of us will face a moment we didn't ask for, a challenge we didn't anticipate, a situation that requires us to become something more. The question is, what will that moment reveal about you? So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with Jared Diamond. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters.

Let that journey begin. I am so honored today to welcome Jared Diamond to Passion Struck. Jared, it is such an honor to have you on the show. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Jared, I thought instead of starting with your new book, which I am going to just show here, today we're going to be discussing your brand new book, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, when do leaders matter? And I was so excited to get an advanced Reuters copy of it.

But before we get into that, I wanted to ask a couple background questions. I'd like to begin somewhere more personal for you. You and my father, as we were discussing, were born the same year. And reading many of the interviews I had read to get prepared for today's interview, I was really struck by something. After a lifetime of scientific discovery, winning the Pulitzer winning book, MacArthur Fellow. changing how we understand civilizations, et cetera,

you said in one of the interviews that the accomplishment you're most proud of is helping your wife and children find happiness. And I wanted to ask, looking back across nearly nine decades, how has your definition of a life well-lived changed? Interesting current question. Last Tuesday night,

I had dinner with several friends, my age, all of them famous, and it was a man's bonding evening. As the evening came to an end, the subject turned to looking back on our lives, what are we most proud of? And here I was sitting next to two famous filmmakers. All of us had complicated, partly tortured lives, and I reflected what I'm most proud of is what I've contributed to the happiness, of my wife and my two children. After that, the second thing is my books, especially guns, German steel, the best known of my books. The third thing is my exploration of the mountains of New Guinea. I've done things that nobody else could have done. And so those are the things

that I regard as my main accomplishments. There are things that I wish that I'd done. There are things where I failed people, but those are the things that I'm most proud of. Yeah, and I'm going to ask a follow-up question I didn't plan to ask. There's a famous professor at Cornell University named Tom Gillivich. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Tom's work or not, but he studies in many ways life's regrets, and he has done lots and lots of research on people who are in their third trimester, as he calls it in life. And he found, interestingly, that 76% of them all have the same regret, that they didn't end up living the life that they had wanted for themselves. They didn't become who they thought they could become. And I'm interested in that session you

had with these famous people. Did this discussion come up at all? Did any of them express regrets like that? No, because at least two of the other four are famous with major achievements that everybody knows and that they understand. Another has been a major explorer. So no, and similarly, in my case, I've done what I wanted to do. I've had a lot of success of doing things that I care about and that I think I was best qualified to do. So I don't, I'm satisfied with having fulfilled my potential. Jared, you've spent a career studying civilizations, history, biology, geography, psychology, and now in this latest book, Leadership.

After a lifetime of asking enormous questions, have you found that wisdom comes from discovering answers, or from learning to ask better questions? Both and more, the question of leadership, everybody is interested in the questions of leadership. In that case, what do I have to contribute there? What I have to contribute is the method of natural experiments. That's to say, we could learn a lot about leaders.

If we could do experiments on the way we could on bacteria, if we could have killed Hitler in that car crash of 1930, would the world have been different? Some people say yes, some people say no. Well, it's not possible to go around killing people, and if we could, it wouldn't be nice and it wouldn't be moral, it wouldn't be legal. But there are natural experiments.

That's to say people do die, and other people don't die among political leaders, among the hundreds of world political leaders since World War II. About 57 have been assassinated, and a larger number maybe 70 have died natural deaths of heart attacks and drowning. And the majority have not died. So we can compare all those leaders who did die and those leaders who didn't die. And look at the effects, say, on the economy, if you want to know whether leaders affect the economy.

Compare what happens when a leader dies and when a leader doesn't die. That's an example of a natural experiment. And similarly, in sports, coaches get fired and coaches don't get fired. fired. You can compare what happens when the coach gets fired or when the coach does or in the business world, business leaders die like Steve Jobs. They don't die like Bill Gates. They get fired. They get transferred to other companies. So these are natural experiments. And that's the method that I've contributed to the study of leadership. And we're going to explore all of that a lot more in the coming minutes. But one thing I want to

to talk about before that is I was looking at all of your life. One thing that has always fascinated me about you is your intellectual curiosity. You began as a physiologist, then became a geographer, a historian, an anthropologist, and then an environmental scientist. What has spending a lifetime crossing so many different disciplines taught you more of that staying in a world? one field ever could have? Well, moving from field to field, what I've learned in one field helps me in another field. For example, I began my career as a gallbladder physiologist. I was the world's expert on the gallbladder, which is a model for the intestine and kidney. Well, to study the gallbladder, I can study experimentally. I took gallblattars from fish and from rabbits, and I did experiments,

manipulated experiments on them. Then I began to work in New Guinea, studying New Guinea birds. In New Guinea, it's not permitted and it's not nice and it's not feasible to go around killing New Guinea birds. I had to figure out experimental ways. Well, there are experimental ways,

namely I go around different New Guinea mountains, and if I'm interested in whether the Rowland mouse warbler has an effect on the distribution of the Highland Mouse warbler, I look at a batch of mountains, all of which have the Highland Mouse Warbur where the Lower Mouse Warbler is present, and then I look at a batch of mountains where the lower mouse waller is absent,

and I see whether the presence or absence of the Lower Mouse Warb that I did not create myself, whether that natural experiment affects the distribution of Mountain Mouse Warb. That came from my background of being a laboratory physiologist doing manipulative experiments and having to find a substitute for them when I began studying New Guinea birds, And similarly, when I studied human societies, well, why is that you and I are here speaking English language and we're sitting here, I'm here in Los Angeles, on land that was occupied by Native Americans 500 years ago?

Why did it turn out that way? Why is it not the case that in Europe nowadays, why is Europe not largely populated by Native Americans, why are Europeans not speaking Nawat, or the language of the Aztec Empire? They're speaking European language. Why did it turn out that way and not the reverse way. Well, we don't have a time machine that allowed us to plant

to Zuma in Europe. Instead, we do have different continents and different parts of continents that offer us natural experiments. So those are things that I've learned from one field that I could apply to another field. I think that's great. And I happen to be watching a speech that you gave in Korea not too long ago. And you were talking about evolution of humanity through time, how for three million years, we really lived as Robin Dunbar has studied in kind of tribes of 150 or less. And it's not until the recent couple of millennia that we've really discovered horses and boats. And over the past couple hundred years, discovered more rapid ways of transportation. So when I think of the United States, had it not been for that evolution of

technology, we wouldn't even be talking here today because there would have been no way for Europeans to have gotten to North America to begin with. Right. And there, because my fieldwork on birds since 1964, what's that, 64 years ago, 62 years ago, I've been studying New Guinea birds, but in New Guinea, the people there are New Guineans. New Guineans until modern times were traditional people living without riding, without metal tools. They had stone tools. One of my New Guinea's assistant told me about the last trip that he made to a stone quarry to make stone tools. And they didn't have centralized government.

But that's what everybody in the world was like until beginning 10,000 years ago, when some people began to develop chiefs. And then later, some people began to develop metal. tools, and then some people began to develop writing. So in New Guinea, I've seen much of what the world used to be like until 10,000 years ago. Thank you for going through that with me, because it's interesting to me that you've now turned your attention to leadership. Why now do you think it's the time to talk about leaders? And more importantly, why leaders matter? Sure, big questions. Why did I write this book now?

When I finish each book, there are big questions that I'm interested in. And when I finish one book, when I finished Guns, Dern and Steel, on my mind was the question why some societies collapse like the classic lowlanders or Easter Islanders and other societies didn't collapse like Ticapia. When I finished my most recent book, 2019, my book upheaval, about national crises, my life has been spent under the shadow of leaders good and bad. I grew up in a world dominated by Hitler. I married into a Polish family, the last of my relatives in Europe,

and many of my wife's relatives died or had miserable lives because of Hitler. Why did it happen that way? Why did it not happen another way? And then my own life is a scientist. There are leaders who made a big difference for me. There are other leaders who didn't do anything for me, but that they didn't do me harm. And then conversely, I've had students,

dozens and dozens of students who mean a lot to me and I have personal relations with them. And my students tell me that I made a difference for them. So the question of leadership has been on my mind, in many spheres, in politics, of course, Hitler, Winston Churchill, etc. In the business world, if there hadn't been Bill Gates, would somebody else have done it? In sports, John Wooden, my UCLA coach, or in sports, why is it that Argentina failed to win the World Cup? They made a big mistake and studies of sports leadership by business school professors.

Sports is a wonderful field to study leaders because the results are clear. Every week you get the numbers out, and Argentina made a big mistake. And then finally, religious leaders. Why is it that the religion that spread around the world, most Christianity, started as a religion of the Western Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, when they're all right there's Jesus, but they're charismatic, they were charismatic New Guinea, charismatic Native Americans. So these questions of leadership arise in many spheres.

And why did you choose to use the word matter? When do leaders matter? Because that's a really important word to me, but it means something different to different people. An answer would be the question about leaders is, well, why do they matter? Do they matter? If so, under what circumstances do they matter? And in what ways do they matter? When I got into this, I thought leaders matter in different ways. There are some leaders who are uniquely qualified. Nobody else could have done what they did. There are other leaders who are not uniquely qualified. So Bill Gates, yeah, he's a notably talented person,

but there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands, probably millions of Americans who were young and computer nerds. But Bill Gates did things in a way different from how other leaders would have done. And we know that because there were other, similarly Mark Zuckerberg, Millions of people could have done what Mark Zuckerberg did, but we know how other people did things in social media, and Mark Zuckerberg did it differently. And then finally, there are leaders who didn't make a difference. There are reasons why they didn't make a difference. They were there at the wrong place and the wrong time.

Or what they wanted was what everybody else wanted anyway. Or like Clement Attlee, British Prime Minister at the end of World War II, he had excellent colleagues. And if he hadn't done it, his colleagues would have done it. So in short, I discovered when I got into this, that leaders can make a difference or they don't make a difference. And if they do make a difference, they can make a difference in different ways. We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Jared Diamond. As you're listening, I'd like you to think about one question.

What situation in your life is asking more of you right now? One of the ideas that I found so fascinating in Jared's new book is that leadership isn't simply about finding the right traits or following a formula. The person matters, but so does the moment. Sometimes the circumstances that were given reveal strengths and capabilities. We didn't even know we had. So as you listen to the rest of this conversation, think about this. What might your circumstances be calling out of view?

Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Jared Diamond. I guess where I was going at with the question is that I saw that you rejected both the idea that history is shaped by great men, but you also rejected the idea that leaders are merely prisoners of circumstance, which you just alluded to. So it fills in the gap. So then why for the leaders matter? Since you've mentioned Bill Gates a couple times, he is someone I have actually

met on more than one occasion. I will just describe one interaction I had with them. I happen to be a senior executive at the time at Dell. And for people who don't to know this, Dell was extremely important as were HP and other companies because without us, the operating system of Microsoft couldn't be distributed to its users. And at the time, Steve Balmer was leading the company, but this was right before we were going to launch the mobile phone. And so they both came to meet with Michael and a number of us to talk about the evolution of the smart device. And what I remember most about that interaction when Steve Balmer was there was how quiet Bill Gates actually was. He really spent most of the time observing the conversation and letting Steve and the Dell

representatives have most of the conversation. But then I realized he would weigh in in particular moments when he thought it was important to raise his point of view. And it really showed me a different side of him than I think those who have never met him do. He wasn't the type who had to be the one talking or the most important one in a discussion, but what he said, I found was extremely important when he did speak. And it's because he had observed and understood what was happening at a much larger perspective than many of the other people in the room. And I'm not sure if that is something you've seen in your interactions with. him. I've met him. I've had long conversations with him on about four occasions. In contrast to your

experience of talking with him and a group of other people, my conversations with him have all been one-to-one conversation. I've had good experience of him. I know that there are people who have found him an abrasive, but I've found him a thoughtful, gentle, reflective person. Just as an example, in our first meeting, the subject came up of what are the big threats to the world? And Bill Gates began this by saying, Jared, I know that you're concerned about environmental threats. Maybe you're right, but I'm concerned about emerging diseases. All right. He was not competitive. He was thoughtful. He was willing to consider other points of view. My experience with him has been a happy experience. The experience that you saw and the experience that I saw in at least one of the two interactions I've had were very similar.

He was very pleasant in the conversation. His counterpart was not, but maybe that was the Jacqueline Hyde that they were trying to perform in the room. One person was the good cop. One person was the bad cop. Well, I'm going to move. I should just add there as a contrast case. So you mentioned that you met Bill Gates together with other people who did most of the talking. I'm thinking there, a meeting that I had in Japan with the executives of one of Japan's biggest companies. And there were five Japanese on the other side of the table, one other American.

The CEO, in the course of a two-and-a-half-hour evening, the CEO did all of the talking except that and vice president about four seats down, managed to get in a couple of sentences. But otherwise, this was not like Bill Gates. It is what I've heard of differences between countries and companies that in Japan, CEOs are more all-powerful. They don't get, but they deprive themselves of input from other people. And that is damaging for Japan. For example, in my career as a scientist, my students have regularly told me my children. 27-year-old students were not. Jared, you don't know what you're talking about.

There are new developments here, and let us tell you about these new developments. So my students have offered decisive insights to me, and I've learned a lot. I've taught my students, but I've learned a lot from my students. Jared, on Passionstruck the show, we often explore the tension between circumstance and choice. And reading your book, I was wondering whether that's really what you're studying here. do great leaders create history or do they recognize opportunities that history presents? What are your thoughts on that? Two of those things that you say are correct and I would add a third thing to them.

Do leaders create opportunities or do opportunities fall into their laps? I divide leaders with that respect into three categories. There are leaders who recognized that the time and place are right. And they then seized the opportunity. Charles de Gaulle, French president of Charles de Gaulle, became president of France just after World War II. He then realized that the French governmental system was not suitable for doing what he wanted.

And so he resigned the presidency, but he remained in contact with French politicians. And in 1958 at the time of the Algerian war, de Gaulle recognized that the time was right, and then he engineered his comeback. So there are leaders who engineered the opportunities. There are other leaders who recognize that the time and place is right, but they cannot engineer the opportunities.

Winston Churchill, when he became Prime Minister of England at the outbreak of World War II in Europe in May 1940, Winston Churchill could not create World War II, but when World War II happened, he recognized this was the moment for which my whole life was preparing me. and he used those words. And then the third situation, so there are people who create the opportunity,

there are people like Winston Churchill who couldn't create the opportunity, but recognized that this was their time. And then finally, there are people who don't realize that this is the right time. In modern times, Mark Zuckerberg. It's not that Mark Zuckerberg

created the right time when he was sophomore at all. It happened, and he didn't know it in a retrospect. Genghis Khan, the biggest conqueror in world history who founded the biggest empire from China all the way to Poland. Why did Genghis Khan

fan such a huge empire? We didn't know until about a decade ago Dendrocanologist studying tree rings in Mongolia looked at these tree rings for the last 2,000 years and they discovered that the wettest time in the last 2,000 years in Mongolia was around the time of Genghis Khan's birth. But Genghis Khan, the Mongols, needed wet conditions to provide the hay for the sheep and goats on which they fed,

and they needed the wet conditions to feed the horses that they rode into battle. Genghis Khan didn't know that he happened to be born precisely at the right time in the last 2,000 years. No way he could have known that. We didn't realize it until recently. So in short, some leaders create the opportunities. Some leaders have the opportunities handed to them and they recognize it. And finally, some leaders like Angus Khan have the opportunities to hand it to them, but they don't recognize it. You said earlier that you grew up around World War II.

And given when you grew up, Hitler would have been a huge person whose history, not that it isn't today, but even more so then would have been discussed. Why did you choose to open up the book talking about him and that car crash in 1930 that almost took his life? The first paragraph of my book is about a car crash in 1930 where Hitler's chauffeur-driven car

was coming into an intersection and a big truck came into the intersection at right angles to Hitler's truck. if Hitler's chauffeur-driven car, if the truck had collided with Hitler being in the right side and the truck coming in from, Hitler would have been dead. If Hitler had died in 1930,

would there have been the Holocaust? There might well have been a World War II because of the tree of Versailles, et cetera, et cetera. But the war that took place under Hitler was a distinctive war. Yes, there was anti-Semitism, but industrial scale, killing of six million people, Was that a contribution of Hitler?

Other German leaders might have achieved their goals without war. So that was a good way with which to begin. Growing up during World War II, Hitler was constantly on our minds, and then after the war, because the last of my family in Europe died on the Holocaust, and my wife's family died or survived Auschwitz. I then moved to Germany, and I lived in Germany. I tried to understand why it happened there, could it have happened in another country. But after I lived in Germany, I lived in Chile, where there was a dictator, Pinochet,

whose tortures were worse than those of Hitler, although he didn't get the body count. And then I've worked for 30 years in Indonesia during the years of Suhata, who killed two million Indonesians. So there were other people besides Hitler could have happened in other countries. It did happen in other countries in Germany, but not on an industrial scale. But on top of that, I love German music. Some of my dearest friends are Germans.

My German friends, they were the ones who suffered during World War II. They got often, they lost their brother, they were separated from their father from 11 years. They spent five years sleeping under a bridge because of the bombers. So all those reasons why I began my book with Hitler. Jared, I want to jump from Hitler to President Truman because you cover both in the book.

And one of the things that struck me about both is if you would have looked earlier in history, neither one would have been people that you would have thought could rise up to do what either of them ended up doing. If history couldn't reliably identify either man before their moment arrived, do you think that means that people with the greatest potential to shape our future could be individuals we're overlooking today? Yes, to my surprise, President Truman, everybody recognized that President B. Truman had a completely undistinguished life, even when he became vice president.

Roosevelt didn't even bother to bring Truman into meetings. Truman had gotten to be a judge and then a senator in various illicit ways. So nobody expected Truman to be a distinguished president. And yet, when he became president, he was confronted with problems, big problems, how to end the war, to use or not to use the atomic bomb, what to do about the Berlin airlift, what to do about Russia requiring the hydrogen bomb. He made these decisions courageously. He was disliked, scorn for them. Most of all, he was scorn for firing General MacArthur, although in retrospect, it's now considered, that was the right

decision. So Truman was someone who became a outstanding president without any foreshadowing. And in the case of Hitler, I assumed that Hitler was obvious when he was, no, it wasn't obvious. Hitler himself said the first speech that he gave was when he was 30 years old, and the people who had served with him when he was in the German army during World War I say, he was an undisinguished person, a quiet person. We didn't expect him to be a leader. A conclusion is that it's difficult to recognize whether there are other people who might have done it. And yet in my book, I think I've identified a number of cases, Seretsi Kama, the first president of Botswana, Linda Reznor, who founded industrial scale pomegranate juice, where we can say nobody else could have done it. In the case of Soretti Kama, the founding president of Botswana, there were only 22 college graduates in Botswana when Botswana became independent. And Seretsi Kama, he was chief of the biggest tribe. He was the only one who could take away powers from the chiefs. And it was on his land that diamonds were found that became the wealth of Botswana. He was the only one who could say,

the diamonds belong not to my tribe, but to the nation of Botswana. So as a contrast case to Truman and to Hitler, I think that Sretti Kama and a few others are people who really made a difference in nobody else could have done it. After looking at the three people we've just covered, so we have three political leaders across different countries, cultures, etc. Were there patterns across all of them that genuinely surprised you that you didn't expect? I'm laughing because in chapter three in my book, I have a table of major political leaders since we're working, about 22 of them. And when I looked at them, the thing that surprised me that I hadn't expected, I hadn't even asked the question was that of these 22 leaders, there were only two who stepped down from power voluntarily.

One was Nelson Mandela and then Li Kuan Yu of Singapore. But the other 20 leaders, they didn't step down voluntarily. Some of them got assassinated. One of them committed suicide. Some died of heart attacks. Some got voted out of office. In other words, once a person becomes a major political leader, they conclude that they are well qualified to do it.

And in the vast majority of cases, they don't step down voluntarily. That was the biggest surprise for me. So to now go to something that you call the Hamlet test, and I want to use Harry S. Truman as kind of the test here. Do you think if he wasn't the one who stepped up when he did, do you think there was anyone else living at the same time in the U.S. leadership who could have achieved something similar? to him. And the second part of this is, why is Shakespeare the perfect model for evaluating this question? Let's take your first question. Could anyone other than Harry Truman have done it? I think that 95 other people could have done it, namely there were 96 senators, and most of those senators were more distinguished and more experienced than Harry Truman, whether they would have had the

courage of Truman, we don't know, but at least the experience and qualifications, yes. As for Shakespeare and what I called the Hamlet Test, this question that you're asking, could anyone else have done it? Is there one person who is uniquely qualified? In most cases, I think there are lots of other people. Bill Gates, okay, how many million computer nerds were there in the Bill Gates was a very able person, but there were other able people. But in a few cases, one can say he was the only person could have done it. So Hamlet, which was often regarded as the greatest play in the English language, could someone else other than Shakespeare have written Hamlet?

Well, to write Hamlet, you had to have a theater company, you had to have experience, and you had to have written previous plays. Hamlet was not Shakespeare's first play. He'd already written Romeo and Juliet, and Julia Caesar, another good plays. He had proven that he was an outstanding dramatist before he came to write Hamlet. We know who were the other Elizabethan dramatists at the time. There were 20 of them.

We've got their plays, Ben Johnson, Marlowe, etc. And their plays, some of them are good plays, but they're not remotely as good as Hamlet. And so we can name all the other people who might have written major plays because they had to be dramatist in Elizabethan Theatre, and none of them wrote plays remotely as good as Hamlet. So we can say that Shakespeare was uniquely qualified to write Hamlet.

In the world of politics, I mentioned that Soretti Kama was uniquely qualified to be the founding president of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Yes, they're very able people, but one cannot point to say that there are only 33 other individuals among 350 million Americans who could have done what Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did. It's rare that you can identify leaves by the Hamlet test, but sometimes it's possible. I want to talk about Jimmy Carter for a second, and I'm going to bring him up for this reason. One of your strongest conclusions that I found is that founders matter disproportionately because they create the rules, the culture, and the institutions that everyone else inherits. So it made me wonder, should we judge great leaders less by what they accomplish while they're in office and more by what continues after they leave.

And I'm bringing Jimmy Carter up because if you would have looked at him just through his presidency, it tells one story. But if you look at his legacy following his time in office, it tells a completely different story. That's a very good point. I hadn't thought of it in that way. But it is the case. People often ask me, Jared, why in your book do you not discuss Angela Merkel or Donald Trump. And I said in my book that I don't discuss standing leaders, refuse to discuss

standing leaders today or leaders who stepped down recently because we can't judge the outcome. In the case of Angela Merkel, views about her have changed notably within the last few years. And so I avoided discussing standing leaders. In the case of Jimmy Carter, that's an interesting point that you raise, leaders need to be judged after their term in office has ended, and one can see what the outcome is. And that outcome includes what people have done following them. For example, when Likman knew the founding Prime Minister of Singapore, when he stepped down, Singapore has continued to be a very successful, a very honest country because of the institution that he set up. Similarly, George Washington. So George Washington died.

what, 250 years ago. But the institutions to which he contributed, and George Washington made the decision, as president he would only serve two terms. That precedent continued until Roosevelt, and when Roosevelt broke that precedent, then the Constitution was amended to go back to what George Washington has set up.

So in short, your point is correct that leaders have to be judged not only by what happened when they were in office, but also by what happened after they were in office. It was just an interesting, I went to the Naval Academy, so he's one of our most famous graduates. And it just got me wondering because another thing you introduced was the idea of discretion, meaning the amount of freedom a leader actually has to shape events. And I grew up in a home where my dad had this beloved image of Churchill in this black and white image of him. in a prominent place in our house, my entire upbringing.

And Churchill in wartime had enormous discretion. But what we see in Churchill in peacetime is that he had far less. And the reason I think Carter is an interesting example here is Carter is like the exact opposite. In these moments, when he probably should have had less ability to shape events, he actually shaped world events in a huge way. So it was just an interesting thing for me as I was thinking through it. Right. That's a good point. And here are two more examples of what you're thinking of. The first chancellor of Germany after World War II was Conrad Adenauer. And he was regarded as a very

effective chancellor who established democratic government in Germany when Germany had not had democratic government, and he maintained good relationships with potential allies of Germany. Conrad Adinau has then been followed by an unbroken succession of effective chancellas in Germany. He established institutions and he established an example that subsequent German chancellors have lived up to. The point that you make about Churchill is correct, namely that particular the people can be effective at particular times and places. Churchill was a great wartime prime minister. He was undistinguished as a peacetime prime minister, so much so that in his last term as peacetime prime minister, his colleagues were doing whatever they could to get him out of

office, partly because he was older, but also because he was well-matched to a wartime job. It was not well matched to a peacetime job. So this makes the point that the circumstances are important. A leader may be good under some circumstances, but that same person, not under the other. Surrezi-coma founding president of Botswana. If he had been founding president of Somalia, you would never hear of Sorretzicama because there's not much that you can do with Samoa. There were things you could do with Botswana. Jared, up into this point, we've been talking a lot about presidents and heads of state. But one thing I appreciated about your book is that you don't believe leadership principles stop at politics.

You ask the same exact questions of business leaders. Can someone like Jeff Bezos shape history in the same way a president can? Or does business leadership work differently? Business leadership, in some cases, a business leader is uniquely qualified as was Shakespeare. An example. So, pomegranate juice. Pomegranate juice, it's not as important as computers, but more or less it's a good example. There was no pomegranate juice. Pomegranates have been around for 4,000 years, and people in

Middle Eastern markets squeeze juice out of them, but they squeeze it one by one. It's difficult to do anything with pomegranates, and most Americans didn't know about pomegranates, but there's a couple in Los Angeles, and I know them. They bought agricultural land, and on their agricultural land, they bought some land for almonds and on the land were 110 pomegranate bushes, and they were going to pull them out. But then they heard that pomegranates, you can sell them for Thanksgiving, put them at Thanksgiving table. And then they heard that pomegranates have health benefits. So they got seriously interested in this. And they then became the biggest pomegranate growers in the United States. The other 20 pomegranate growers, all in California, they were small growers,

they didn't have much of the market, they didn't have much money, they couldn't develop a pomegranate business, and they weren't interested in developing a pomegranate business, but the resnics did. They put huge amounts of money into it, maybe $200 million. They've not made much money at pomegranates, but they founded the pomegranate juice industry. So lots of us now drink pomegranate juice, and there's now a section in supermarkets and supermarkets, and supermarkets, premium juices, which includes pomegranates and various other juices, they were uniquely qualified to do that. And now I've gotten so involved with them that I've, please bring me back to a question of the test. Oh, well, so if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the Resnix who help bring

pomegranates to the world, correct? So if they passed the Hamlet test through their combination of what I'm hearing is vision, patience, branding, and execution were genuinely unique. then therefore that becomes kind of the benchmark, which then brings me back to the obvious question. Why doesn't Jeff Bezos pass the same test? Jeff Bezos passes another test. Jeff Bezos does not pass the Hamlet test because all right. So Jeff Bezos set up all and everything store. He had the idea of selling everything and he set it up online. But there were other people who had the idea and set up everything businesses. eBay already existed before Jeff Bezos. eBay was in everything, isn't everything

business, but in a different way from Jeff Bezos, namely other people put their stuff on Mark. And then Walmart, which was a successful retailer, Walmart then set up in everything business, but they did it not online. They did it with brick and mortar stores. Jeff Bezos set up everything store, but he did it in a distinctive way. namely he did it online. Was he the only person who could have done it? Probably not because he set up Amazon at a time when the internet was exploding by a factor of 4,000 each year. Other people would notice it. So if Jeff Bezos, we know that other people set up everything stores, and there might have been hundreds of thousands of other people who would have set up an online everything store.

But he never was, he did it in a distinct way. He did it online. not brick and mortar and not in the eBay-based style. So that's an example of someone who made a difference in the way that he did something that other people, similarly Mark Zuckerberg. They were social media before Mark Zuckerberg. There were lots of other social media today. But Mark Zuckerberg set up his social media in a distinctive way that included a light button that stimulated some extreme points of view and Gabby.

So Mark Zuckerberg did not create social media. there were lots of other people who created social media, but he created a social media medium in a distinctive way, all of which can be summed up by saying that there are some people who passed the Hamlet test. Nobody else could have done anything. There are other people who don't pass the Hamlet test, but they did things in a distinctive way that other people would have done or did do in other ways. It's interesting. I've never met Jeff Bezos.

I've known a lot of people who worked directly under him, who I've had the chance to ask questions and get some insight. But thinking about where we've been going in the arc of this discussion, it's making me wonder, the greatest leaders don't necessarily invent the future, but they shape its character. And when I think about Bezos, one of the things that I think was really unique that he did

is he embedded a philosophy into Amazon of long-term, thinking and customer obsession right into its DNA. And so he's building these tangencies, like getting into books, to get audience. But he always knew there was something bigger than the audience. He was always concerned because he knew longer term that the data was the most important thing. Because when I think of Amazon, they're really a data company. And these different avenues that they have to serve customers are really the entry point. It's like the operating system from the different business lines are really the distribution channels, but at its core, they're really focused on data algorithms and then making choices and long-term decisions to benefit the business

based on those analytics. Is that kind of a way to think about this? Yes, it is a way to think about this. There are other people who don't fit exactly the Jeff Beez's model, but they're distinctive. They put their stamp on industries just as Jeff Beezus in other way. For example, Steve Jobs, all right. There are other people. There were, and there still are other cell phones, and there have been other tablet computers. But Steve Jobs, he was with Apple among the found. He was, He was fired. Apple then went downhill. He was brought back. So we know that he made a difference because he saved Apple. Steve Jobs had a distinctive style. Then instead of putting out lots of products, he said, we'll focus just on four or five products. Okay, that's a decision. He also cared a lot about external appearance. He cared a lot about ease of customer use.

the contrast case, our television set, to turn on our television set, my wife and I, we've got this 47 button remote. When I tried to watch the world overcocks, I had to call my son Joshua. What do I do with these 47 buttons? Steve Jobs wouldn't tolerate. Steve Jobs had really, user-friendly divisive. So he put his distinctive stamp. Elon Musk also put his distinctive stamp in line after for long. not only electric cars, but rockets, etc. Elon Musk, I've met Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, I did not meet. I did meet Jeff Bezos once. I met Bill Gates.

Elon Musk is a very distinctive person, and in his various lines, e-cars and rockets, his style includes, make it, simplify the line, fewer people. Other people, Jeff Bezos, now has its own private rockets, but Elon Musk took a different approach and so forth, some of a more successful approach to having private rockets. And one of my favorite parts of the book was what happens when a CEO dies, becomes ill, etc.

And I lived through this two different experiences. One firsthand and the other was a separate experience that I had firsthand, but I wasn't as in the middle of the company. to speak. So the first one was when I was at Lowe's, when I first got there, our CEO was a gentleman by the last name, Tillman, who grew up within Lowe's, was more of an operator. People cherished him, but he was extremely demanding. And then during most of my time there, Robert Niblock replaced him, and Robert came from a completely different pedigree. He was the CFO, he was much more gentler, much more analytic, didn't have necessarily nearly as much a pulse on the customer as

Tillman did. And you saw a major change start to happen in how the customer was valued between the two. And then my other experiences, I'm going to go back to Microsoft because when I met Bill Gates the second time, I was being interviewed to be a senior executive there, a C-level executive, while Steve Bomber was still the CEO. And it's interesting because the two interviews I had back to back were I first met with Bill Gates, who was trying to convince me during our interview, and this was a time that I met him one-on-one, how good the culture was. And then my next interview was with Satya Nadella, who in the next interview was telling me

how bad the culture is, but don't give up on coming there because he thinks it could be great again in the future. And this was a few years before he even got the opportunity to do it. But it's interesting because after Gates left, in many ways, you could say Microsoft, in some ways, lost its way. And then under Nadella has had a complete rebirth in a different way of getting back to its core roots. And so I thought they were two different experiences that I've had that show how much this matters when you have a person who leaves their post and another person takes over. That's very interesting. The same company performs under leaders with different styles.

It's also interesting because one of the natural experiments that people in the business world, in the laboratory, you put a gallbladder here, you put a gallbladder that you can manipulate it, In the business world, you can't manipulate leaders, but leaders get manipulated and they manipulate themselves. Leaders move from one company to another company. And similarly, sports coaches frequently get fired and then move to another team. In Argentina, something like 400 coaches get fired. And so one has the natural experiment of seeing how the same leader does with different companies. Therefore, one has a basis for judging the quality of leader, independent of the quality of the company. If a company is doing very well, there may be four reasons. It might be

it's a good time in the business world in general. It might be that it's a strong industry. It might be that it's a well-run company like Brucken Gamble, or it might be that it's a successful CEO. You can sort out the contributions by seeing what happens when a new changes. in a company, or when a CEO moves from one company to another company, if the same CEO has success in many different companies, that gives you reason to believe that CEO contributed. And with experiments of that sort, the conclusion that business schools professors or students have come to is that of those four factors, the smallest factor is the year. Yes, one think they're a depression, but in fact, the year affects a, you know,

accounts for only something like 3% of company earnings on the average. The CEO accounts for between 10 and 30% of company earnings. The particular business like Procter & Gamble accounts for another 15% to 20%. There are some industries that are very profitable. There are some industries that are unprofitable. So the experiment that you mentioned of a leader changing or moving from one company to another. That's the natural experiment that business school professors use to try to to sort out the roles of league. And simply in the sports world, the way that the fixionados of sports figure out whether Bill Belichick really made a difference. See what happens when Bill Belichick moves to another team or when Tom Brady leaves the New England Patriots. Those are

natural experiments. Well, that one, depending on how you look at it, sure prove the value of Tom Brady, given he was able to go to another team and take them immediately to a championship. And then you saw the other team slowly, well, not slowly, quickly demise when he left. And it's interesting because I've had the opportunity to both interview and just have casual conversations with people who played with Tom Brady. And what they tell me again and again is Tom could become the coach of a high school team that has finished 0-10 for the last six years. And in a matter of a year or two, they'd be the state champion.

They just all tell me he had such not only a work ethic, but a way of bringing his teammates up through example that made him just a superior teammate to play with. So I love that example that you brought up. And since we're on the topic of coaches, I can't leave this discussion without talking about John Wooden. And it's interesting. I just did a solo episode. And I didn't talk about John's championships in my solo episode. I talked about how the first thing he does before he does anything at the start of a season is he would take his players through an exercise of teaching them how to put on their socks the right way. And I love that story because when you hear from people who played underneath him,

rarely do those players ever talk about the championships that they won. They almost universally talk about the person that he helped them become. And my question for you, Jared, is do you think that's the highest form of leadership, not changing outcomes, but changing human beings? That's a value question. There are people who might say that's the highest form of leadership. If one instead asks, what is the legacy of a leader? Leaders who John Wooden did change human beings. Conrad Adanauer, one doesn't hear about Conrad Adanauer changing human beings, but he certainly

set up institutions. Charles de Gaulle certainly did not change human beings. human beings, but he set up powerful institutions and he dealt with very difficult situations. So in answer to your question, I would say that's a value question. There are people who might place value on leaders who change human beings. There are other people who would say, he or she didn't change human beings, but he or she made a big difference. Well, towards the end of the chapter, you make what I think is one of the most profound observations in the entire book.

you argue that Wooden's uniqueness wasn't his drills or his discipline. It was that every aspect of his coaching flowed from a coherent philosophy of life. And so my question is, have we become too focused on teaching leadership techniques and not focused enough on helping leaders develop a philosophy that's worth following in the first place? Undoubtedly, yes, I've not been to business school, but my understanding is the business school is about teaching techniques. But you don't go to business school in order to be told that you should be a wonderful, admirable human being. You don't pay $50,000 a year to get that message. Leaders who have been wonderful, admirable human beings and have been successful as leaders.

There are leaders who have been very successful as leaders, but who have been very successful as leaders, but who have not been admirable human beings. I've not heard anyone say that Elon Musk is an admirable human being, but he's been very successful. And Suharto, dictator of Indonesia, Suharto inherited a difficult situation. He dealt with a situation first by killing two million Indonesians, but then he established stability for a country that was on the verge of,

of falling apart. Nobody today would say that Sukarto's legacy was that he served as a model of being an admirable human being. But he made a difference for Indonesia. Jared, I did want to ask this question. I know you don't talk about current leaders, so I'm going to phrase this differently. As you look through history and leaders you've studied, have you found another time period where we had the leadership type of paradigm that we have now between the leader of Russia, the leader of China, and the president of the United States in a different time period, and things that we need to be aware of looking at history to project what could be hopeful about the future and what we need to be concerned about with the future.

There have been time periods, including recent time periods. First of all, a situation today when you mentioned Putin and the United States. Russia is a dictatorship today. There is concern about the United States ceasing to be a democracy. There are many examples of democracies that have ceased to be democracies. And I lived in one of them, Chile, when I lived in Chile, Chile was the most successful democracy in Latin America. The Chileans, when I was there, said,

Chile is not a South American country. It's a European country that happens to be geographically in South America. It's the most successful democracy in South America. And yet in 1973, Chile became the most evil dictatorship in South America. In response to your question, in the period between World War I and World War II, there were numerous democracies that became dictatorships. Italy was a democracy, and on the Mussolini, it became a dictatorship. Hitler, Germany was a democracy, and under Hitler, it became a dictatorship.

Poland had been a democracy. Poland became a dictatorship. England remained a democracy. The United States remained a democracy. There were risks to democracies. they have been risk to democracies in the past. There are risks to democracies at present. What's going to happen at present?

We don't know. All we can say is that there are democracy that have failed in the past, and we shall see whether democracies today fail. Two last questions to close us out. If there's one lesson today that leaders should take from your research, What do you hope it is? My answer to that question will illustrate why interviewers regularly get frustrated with interviewing Jared Diamond. Because whenever I'm asked a question, what is the one thing?

My answer is always there are 37 things. You and me both. You and me both. If a couple who are about to get married asks, what's the secret of a successful marriage? I know that couple is at risk getting divorced because to have a successful marriage. you've got to get 37 things right. You have to agree about sex and money and children and religion. And if you think that one thing is most important, your marriage is going to end up in disaster. Similarly, for a leader, if a leader asks, what is the one most important thing? I would say the one most important thing is to stop looking for the one most important thing, to focus on getting 37 things right. Okay. And then, Jared, lastly, I found myself, as I was preparing, looking back across your your body of work. Guns, germs, and steel, as I think about it, asked how geography and environment shaped the destiny of civilization, collapse, explored whether societies can choose a different future,

upheaval examined how nations reinvent themselves during the crisis, and this latest book asks under what conditions I felt an individual can change history or change lives. And looking back across those books, and hopefully I've summarized them correctly, was this always an intellectual journey you were consciously pursuing? Or did you only recognize that threat in hindsight? You mentioned you were following deep questions that you were exploring. The sequence of my books was not an intellectual journey that I planned down. Instead, I've always been interested in lots of things. My mother taught me to read when I was three years old. And when I was three, I started keeping a notebook. In the notebook, I have lists of rivers and I have lists of animals. I've always been

interested in lots of things. When I wrote my first book, The Third Chimpanzee, about human evolution. At that time, in that book, was a chapter about collapses of societies. And in that book was also a chapter about why you and I are speaking English rather than speaking Navadal or speaking Quechua. The germs of later books were in my first book. And when I finish one book, after finishing one book, I'd then often fumbled around for what would be the next book. After I finished my book collapse, I thought, I would like to write a book about the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. And so I asked advice, and the advice that I was given was that Jared, a very good book about the cartas of Bach might sell at most 50,000 copies.

If you want to have a bigger mark, I find something else. So I found something else. After upheaval, leadership was what next came to mind, but after collapse, Bach and Tardas came to mind before I finally settled on the world until yesterday. So people often ask me, is there a thread? And no, there's not a thread. There are many different things that I'm interested in. Jared, it was such an honor to have you. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to interview you and for bringing this fantastic book into the world. Thank you. Great pleasure talking with you. I hope today's conversation with Jared Diamond gave you a different way to think about leadership.

One thing that stayed with me is that we often look back at great leaders and assume that potential must have been obvious from the beginning. But as Jared shows us, sometimes we simply don't know what someone is capable of until the moment demands it. Circumstances matter. The challenges we face matter. And sometimes the situation we're in reveals strengths we didn't even know we possessed. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway.

Share it with me on Substat, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you know someone navigating a difficult leadership moment right now, send them this episode. If you haven't already, make sure you're following Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our YouTube channels you never miss what's coming next. Because next Tuesday, I am joined by one of the most influential psychologists of our our time, Dr. Martin Sligman. Marty is the founder, Positive Psychology, and has spent more than 60 years studying one of the most important questions in human flourishing. What gives us the belief that we can shape our own future? His remarkable new book, Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress,

traces the journey from learned helplessness to what he now sees as one of the most powerful forces in human life. The belief that tomorrow can be better than today and that we have the ability to help make it so. And I think that conversation builds perfectly on what Jared and I explored today. Because Jared asks what happens when the moment calls someone to lead. Marty asks an equally important question. What makes someone believe they can? I think you're going to love this conversation. Individual action is where things start. But whether or not it modifies the world, that is, you have mastery, an agency, or it falls flat. And you're helpless and you're non-agentic is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing.

And in general, the more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have. Until then, remember, you may not always know what you're capable of until life asks more of you than you thought you could give. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.