Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. History, to me, has always been one of the most intimidating academic subjects, just because it's at the opposite end of physics in the simplification scale. If you think about how many things happened in any one historical period, literally the number of events that you could potentially write down and record. Well, it's infinite or it's essentially infinite, you know, if you think about every single person doing everything,

that they're doing, history has to be a story of picking and choosing, certain things being important and certain things being unimportant. And it's more than just picking ones that sort of are popular or whatever. You know, when we say what's important, what's unimportant, we're trying to be explanatory. We're trying to tell a story that makes sense of history. Why did this happen? What might we learn from this particular thing happening at that particular point? in time. And once you start doing that, once you start asking, like, why did this happen, why did that happen? There's one obvious question that comes up over and over again, not yet completely settled, of course, which is the relative importance of individuals, right, the great

man theory of history, or at least the idea that one plucky, charismatic, right place, right time, individual person can make choices that have a huge impact on the historical trajectory that goes from there versus the idea that actually they don't. Like maybe we tell stories of presidents and kings and generals and scientists and whatever, but really even without those individuals, things would have happened almost exactly the same. It's very hard to tell because we only have one historical record, right? We can't actually run the parallel universes and see what's going on. So one of the voices that you might sometimes hear in this debate about grand historical deterministic forces versus plucky individuals is today's guest, Jared Diamond, who's a professor at UCLA, who I'm not going to, I'm not sure I'm going to get this right. I believe he started as a professor of physiology and then moved into geography. We talk a little bit in the podcast about what it means to be a big picture interdisciplinary scientist. And of course, he had a very famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel back in like 1997, I think it was,

where a very famous big, big hit, you know, a lot of people read it, I read it, won the Pulitzer Prize, and it put forward the idea that, you know, you can't argue that certain areas of the world, certain continents and countries and things like that, have kind of dominated a little bit in the last few centuries, have, you know, taken over other areas. And why is that? Is it because the people are just especially clever or have more initiative or whatever? And Diamond argued that, no, it had nothing to do,

almost nothing to do with the differences between the people in one area or another. It had more to do with geography and the environment, the ability to do agriculture on large scales, the ability to have enough land, enough natural resources, different kinds of plants, but then also different kinds of metal and the guns in the title. And of course, germs, the ability to maintain immunity or resistance to certain diseases that other people elsewhere didn't have.

So it's sort of a story where individuals didn't make much of a difference in that big picture sweep. So he's written many books since then, but the new book is called, prophets, prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings. When do leaders matter? And there's some, I need to explain the title because you can't look at it. You can only hear me saying it. The two first words, prophets and prophets are spelled P-R-O-F-I-T-S, as in money, P-R-O-P-H-E-T-S as in religious leaders. And also the when-do leaders matter subtitle, the word when is in parentheses. So it's also asking simultaneously, do leaders matter at all? So, you know, don't take the title. incorrectly, it's not like a self-help book to be a good leader. It's asking the historical question, when do presidents and generals, but also CEOs and religious leaders, and for that matter, sports leaders like coaches, when do they matter? How much do they matter? How much is luck? How much is design and all that? So you'll be unsurprised to hear the answer is it's complicated. Sometimes the answer is complicated. The leaders do matter, Diamond argues,

But they don't always matter completely, and whether or not they're going to matter is going to depend a lot on the situation they're in. But that's okay. We love the complications here at the Mindscape Podcast. We're going to dig in and figure out what those complications are, figure out when these people matter and when they don't. So let's go. Jared Diamond, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you. It's good to be with you. You know, I know that you have a new book out, very excited to talk about it. Sadly, for the audience, this is audio only, but Jared has a wonderful cover of the book in the background that you can see.

And I'll put a link to the book, of course, in the show notes. But famously, you've written other books, and I wanted to kind of use your previous books just as an intro to get into the new one. So many of us have read guns, germs, and steel. for example. That was a big hit. Could you tell us both, for those who haven't read it, what the basic idea of that book was, and then how do you think about it

a certain number of years later? Sure. Guns, German, Steel, is about the question, why are you and I now speaking English, you and I of evidently European background while we are standing on the land of Native Americans? Why did it work that way? Why is it not the case that the Aztec Emperor Montezuma came to Europe and imposed a natural language on all of Europe?

And the last Europeans are living somewhere up in the out. Why did history turn out that way? The reason that it's really the biggest question of history. The reason why it's a personal question for me is that I've worked in New Guinea studying birds and evolution and setting up national parks since 1964. And when I first went to New Guinea in 1964, New Guineans were known as so-called traditional people. That's the same. Living by a lifestyle that humans had a practice for millions of years, New Guineans then did not have writing. They did not have metal tools. they had stone tools.

They did not have state government. Why did it turn out that way? Why were New Guineans so-called, quote, primitive people, although he wouldn't say that. And so I went out to New Guinea, naive. At that time, nobody understood why did it work that way. I went out expecting to find that New Guineans were different, and there was something about New Guineans that explained why no writing stone or metal tools. And it took me about one day to realize that,

It was literal. One day, New Guineans are every bit of smart, if anything, smarter and more curious than Europeans. And the reason why New Guinea did not develop writing, et cetera, had nothing to do with New Guineans' brains versus European's brains. There was some other explanation, but I didn't know the explanation. Historians didn't know the explanation. That question had been on my mind for decades. And that was the subject of my second book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which it took me 34 years after I started to work in New Guinea to figure out the answer, which I think with due respect is the correct answer. And what's the answer?

The answer is it has nothing to do with human brains and it has everything to do with the environment. Different environments offer different things that are the basis of the human population growth and human reserve capacity, human excess food that could feed people. need to come full by a reader. Because he needs to come eat ventures and defeat businesses, figure out how to make marks to count cheap and that developed the writing system. Just as an example, Australia, Aboriginal Australia,

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

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

Close behind were China, a little further behind, were Mexico with great plants such as corn and tomatoes, but without big domestical animals. the Andes and then smaller areas of origins of agriculture were the Indian subcontinent and New Guinea, beloved New Guinea. There was sugar cane and yams and bananas and then three parts of Africa. So the only way of saying that the reason that you and I are speaking English or not Nalwato has everything to do with the wild plants and animals with a fertile crescent, which gave rise to Fertile Crescent civilization, which got carried into Europe and gave rise to European, quotes, civilization. Well, I noticed, though, that the people of the Fertile Crescent do not rule the world right now. That's right.

There were things that happened. The Fertile Crescent had weak advantages. Those advantages were the domestical plants and animals. Once those domesticable plants and animals spread, and they spread quickly, they spread to Europe, Many, they spread eastwards. Some of them sheep and wheat spread to China. Once those advantages of the Fertile Crescent had spread out, the Fertile Crescent was left with no unique advantages.

But apart from those domesticable plants and animals, the Fertile Crescent, even today is not the greatest place. It's dry. It required irrigation. It's prone to salinization. And so the Fertile Crescent, once its advantages got spread with the rest of the world, Ferdile Crescent did not have any event and fell beyond. And I remember reading the book years ago and really enjoying it.

The one, it generated a lot of controversy, as I'm sure you know. And I thought that some of it was interesting. Some of it was less salient. The one thing I never quite came to an understanding myself is, so if you compare Europe, which sort of did win in some sense, this competition, versus places like India or China, it wasn't clear to me why amongst those places

that sort of all had all the advantages why one came out ahead of time versus the others. Europe initially had no advantages with regard to agriculture. The only thing significant domesticated in Europe, I believe that poppies were domesticated.

Well, you don't found a word. rural civilization based on poppies. But Europe is immediately adjacent to the Fertile Crescent. So the Fertile Crescent plants and animals, already 8,000 BC spread from Turkey into Greece, then spread quickly across Europe. Europe then had advantages on the question you rate, why Europe and why not India? Because Feral Crescent stuff also spread to India, and some of it spread to China. Europe has geographic advantages that persist to this day. Europe fronts on the Atlantic Ocean. India does not front on the Atlantic Ocean. Europe has this huge inland, the world's biggest inland sea, the Mediterranean, which was a

practice ground for shipbuilding and sailing. And so Europeans were prepared with the ships that they developed once they started poking out into the Atlantic. On the other side of the Atlantic was the new world. And Europeans already in 1500 rounded the tip of Africa and came up to India. The part of the world that came closest to Europe in developing ships and going around the world was China. China had big fleets with some bigger ships than Europe between 1400 and 1432. In 1432, China abolished its big fleets. Europe never did that. Why? Because China had one emperor, And that one emperor, the Chinese fleets, China had everything that it needed. The emperor eventually, in 1432, said, these expensive fleets, they're bringing us back white giraffes, but we don't need white giraffes.

There's nothing. In China, have everything that we need. So the emperor abolished the fleets, whereas in Europe, because Europe began for geographic reasons, because of its peninsulas and its islands and its radially flowing rivers and its mountains. And Europe has always been fragmented politically. To this day, Europe is fragmented politically. But fragmentation, you might think that unity would be invented. No, fragmentation means that there are different policies that are competing with each other. And if one prince had happened in Europe, one prince said these guns we've developed, they're expensive and we're going to get rid of guns.

What happened in Europe is next door walked in, whereas in China, the emperor of China not only abolished the fleet, but abolished an early industrial revolution. But in China, because there's one emperor, there was no other society that could say that's a stupid thing we'll take over. So that's an interesting idea because it seems to say that there's this sort of heavy dose of influence from geography and the environment. At some point, politics and culture comes in, but it sounds like you're saying it can come in more dramatically. when things are unified than when they're fragmented? Politics and culture. Everybody has politics and culture.

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

They were quickly connected by canals. So China got unified already, something like 500 BC. and China's been unified most of the time ever since. Paradoxically, though, unity has been a disadvantage, and disunity in Europe by stimulating competition has been an advantage. So Europe's geography with its peninsula and its island, the British eye, Crete, etc., Europe's geography has been an advantage added on to the advantage of being next to the fertile crescent. I mean, yeah, I guess what I'm trying to.

to get at, and this might be a conjecture that is false, of course, everywhere has culture and politics, like you say, that's clearly true. I can imagine that the effects of culture and politics could be positive or could be negative. And when you're fragmented, you know, the positive effects are more likely to win out because you're competing with your neighbors. And when you're unified, there's just unpredictable fluctuations depending on who the emperor is. That's right. In China, So China led the world as of 1432. It not only had the best ships and the most ships, but China also invented gunpowder and compass and paper, et cetera, et cetera.

So China led the world in the Middle Ages. It was fortunate to have a series of quotes good emperors who promoted development. And then China had emperors who did not promote development. So China's unity sometimes was advantageous, but in the long run it was disadvantageous. And okay, so if the story is holding together of geography and environment, giving people a kind of first mover advantage, the world seems very different now, 500,000 years later, we have technology, it's a sort of a different world. Is geography and environment still all that important?

or has the focus shifted? Oh, geography and environment still important. There are social scientists, including good, admired friends of mine who would say, say, no, what counts today is in. Let's think of the map of Africa. Take a map of Africa with its 48 countries, and on each of those countries, write the average per capita income. If you do that, you will see that.

that Africa is a sandwich. The North Coast, the five countries of the North Coast, and the three countries of the South Coast, almost all of them are richer than any of the countries in the middle, although the countries of the North Coast, like Egypt and else, they're not famous for great institutions and the most superb government, but they're in the temperate zone. Yeah. Where the rest of Africa is in the tropics. The tropics have geographic disadvantages.

is they have tropical diseases, notably malaria and yellow fever and others, a sleepiness. The tropical soils have low productivity compared to the high productivity of the soils of the temperate zone. So that's one serious disadvantage of geography in Africa today. The other discipline, again, take that map of Africa and put the numbers for per capita income. What you'll see is that the inland countries of Africa, the countries that don't have any sea coast, almost all of them are poorer than almost any one of the countries with sea coast. Why? Because if you don't it, if you've got a sea coast, transportation by sea is seven times cheaper per mile per kilogram than transportation over land. But all the inland countries of Africa have to transport by railroad or tropical. or buy the airplane, but that's much more expensive. So does geography make any difference today? Yes, geography is one of the reasons why Africa is poor

and why the inland countries of Africa are poorer and why the tropical countries of Africa are poorer. Okay, very good. I do encourage all of the listeners out there who haven't read the book to read it. It's a fascinating view of the big-scale history of the world. Actually, which makes me think, let me ask this slightly off-kilter question,

because we joked about, you know, not everyone agreed with the book when it came out, right? There's people who are going to disagree. And part of that is just you're trying something so ambitious, right? And you necessarily need to synthesize many areas together. And I worry sometimes that our modern intellectual environment penalizes you just for trying to do that because people will say, well, you didn't get my specialty exactly the way I would have said it. You, as a university professor like me, has probably had experience of what happens when you set foot outside to a discipline. My PhD was a medical physiology.

I made my reputation by studying the gallbladder, not the most important organ, but the gallbladder is a good model for intestine kidneys, which are important organs. So I was the world expert on the gallbladder, and I was appointed professor. of physiology at UCLA Medical School in order to teach medical students, kidney physiology and intestinal physiology. But at the same time, as a child, I'd gotten interest in birds. I developed early on, in fact, just after my PhD, I developed a second career in New Guinea birds. And in fact, I'm better known, much better known among scientists, for my work on evolution and ecology than for my work on gallbladder, physiology. And then particularly when my wife and my twin sons were born, they were born just short of my 50th birthday. And when my twin sons were born, I realized the future

of my boys is not going to depend upon gallblattas. It's going to depend on the state history and geography. So that plus getting a Macaufer fellowship motivated me to, to sort of switch my interest from medical physiology to history and geography. But to go back to your, the penalties in academia for stepping outside of your discipline, there's in academia a belief that you should stick to what you know about. And if you go into other subjects, that's because you're all washed up. You are no longer a way to discipline of the gallbladder or physics, you're going out at other fields because you can't make it. And interestingly, at UCLA, UCLA has been good to me. I've been promoted steadily. It was only one time when I was denied

a promotion at UCLA, and that was immediately after Guns Journal and Sue was published and won the Pulitzer Prize. Oh my goodness. Bill then, my colleagues in the physiology department didn't know about Jared's work on New Guinea Birds. They knew about his work on the gallbladder. And when I got the poet's surprise, and they realized that Jared was studied in New Guinea Birds. My promotion dossier said, Jared has written this book about history and geography, but we can't judge it, and so we're not going to consider it. We note that his papers on New Guinea Birds have a lower citation count. His tape run of Guinea Birds get 49 centation counts or somebody who's studying the 73rd amino acids of beta-glaxis. has a sciathe count of 2000, so we're not going to promote him.

Fortunately, my chair did sympathize me, but Jeff, that just illustrates that there is a penalty, a severe penalty in academia, for going outside of your specialty. I love that story. I'd never heard that story before, and I think it's a good illustration for the listeners of how, because sometimes I get asked, like, how much does it help you to have written books rather than just articles. And you have to explain that it can actually, it can, not necessarily,

but it can actually hurt you. And, I mean, if winning the Pulitzer Prize hurts you, then, yeah, what can the rest of us do? Speaking of books, I don't want to go through all the books because we need to get to profits and profits. But I do want to touch on collapse as one of the books you're talking about

because we're doing this arc from this grand history, geography in the environment. And in the new book, you're looking at people, individuals, and the impacts that they can have. And I'm guessing, even though I'll confess I haven't read it, I mean, collapse about the collapse of societies might be somewhere in the middle, like both aspects intersect there?

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

and relative lack of access to water. The areas where the classic Maya survive were in areas next to lakes. So collapse is still largely about societies, whereas my current book, Prophets, Coaches of the Kings, is about the role of individuals. And there are reasons, which is I was born in 1937. which meant that my first datable memory was the, I grew up in World War II, my first datable memory was the cover of Life magazine that showed for the first time to the American public dead American soldiers. Two American soldiers lying face down ground in Guna Beach, 1940. That is the first thing that I can remember.

And growing up during World War II, my memories as a child were memories of World War II. The last of my mother's family disappeared in World War II. I then married into a Polish family of which one branch ended up in Auschwitz. Some survived. Some didn't survive. The other branch ended up in a Siberian concentration camp. So my life has been spent in the shadow of Lee. leaders, but also my life has been spent with advantages gained from leaders. There are many wonderful leaders to whom I owe the career that I've been able to make.

And so the book that I decided to write, after the year 2019, when I published my book upheaval about crises in different societies, I was ready to write a book about leaders. That's why the current book is not about big society. It's about leaders and it's about the question. When do leaders make a difference and when don't they make a difference? Why do they make a difference under some circumstances? And it looks at leaders in different spheres. Of course, in the political sphere, because I grew up in the world of Hitler,

but also in the business sphere, what difference did Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, make, if any, could someone else have done it? Also sports, because at age nearly 50, I became the father of young boys who became interested in sports in order to have something to talk about with my sons, gallblotters. Yes, I've watched NBA and NFL and World Cup game with my son. So the third chunk of my book is about when do coaches make a difference? And then the last chunk of my book is about religion. If Jesus Christ had died and died in childbirth, would we still have, as the largest world of religion today, a world religion that came out of the Mediterranean? So those are the four areas that I look at.

And then in the epilogue, I look to areas where there are big questions of leadership that could be addressed. by similar methods, leadership in the area of, say, art, and why were the great composers of these 17th, 19th century Germans? Why on Earthshire? Science. Why Darwin? Why Mendel? Military history, do generals make a difference?

Tolstoy's War and Peace is virtually dedicated to theme that generals don't make a They gave orders, but in the lines, they don't hear the orders. And then, of course, social protest. Did Mahatma Gandhi make a difference? Did Mark and Luther King make a difference? So I look in my current book, I look at leadership in these different spheres. And yes, there are common themes and also, interestingly, the methods, the understanding of, of when and whether sports coaches make a difference has been developed, especially by professors

of business school. Yep. Because similar questions arise in business and in sports. But sports is much better for looking questions leaders, because in sports, you see the results every week. In business, you either never see the results. You see every five years. Sports are here on the sideline bouncing up and down, whereas who knows what Bill Gates was doing.

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

is weak, an individual pushing one way or the other can make all the difference. Is that jibes with your experience having written this book? That's an interesting formulation. you know the grokhy brothers. It was my background. In school, my background was in classics. Oh, okay. When I went to Harvard major in biochemistry, for three years, I'm proud to say I won the classics prize for three years.

You know if I worked in the Latin Greek. So the Grokey brothers, I don't have an opinion about. Augustus and Julius Caesar, I think, we're going to make an argument for, but it's difficult to make a strong argument in the past. because we just don't have the richest of information we have at present. Sure. In the politics section in my book, I discuss only politicians in the last, from 1940 onwards,

because we have rich documentation from photographs and then from television. I cut off at 2000. I do not say anything about Anglo-America or. Donald Trump, because we can't pass judgment on the yet. The story is not finished. The politicians that I looked at were politicians from 1940 to 2000, where we have a rich daughter base. And there, yes, one can tell biographies in the case of the Grocky Brothers.

Yes, there are biographies of the Grocky Brothers, but who knows whether the biographies are biased. But in modern times, Yes, we have the method of biography, but we have another powerful method, the method of natural experiments. I understand that your background includes physics. It does. Physicists do manipulative experiments. I, as a gallbladder physiologist, did manipulative experiments.

I dip my gallbladder in potassium solution or sodium solutions. We could do manipulative experiments. But in politics, it's not possible. And if it were possible, it wouldn't be legal or nice to do manipulative experiments. We could learn a lot about whether Hitler made a difference if we could have, say, 20 time machines and have 20 worlds and 10 of which Hitler died, and 9 to 30 and 10 he didn't die. Or we could learn a lot today if we could experimentally kill half the leaders in the world. But that's not nice. We could do it.

But the fact is that of the world's leaders, the significant fraction, have either died natural deaths in office. Since World War II, there have been, I think, something like 85 leaders who died natural deaths, especially heart attack, cancer, drowning like Harold Holt, falling off a horse to deserve. But there were also leaders who have been assassinated. A significant number, I think 57 leaders, have been assassinated. And you can use those at natural experiments. You can compare what happened in countries where the leader died of a heart attack or got assassinated,

and you compare those with 200 countries where the leader did not die of a heart attack. That's what's called a natural experiment. Natural experiments are what I've had to use in New Guinea to study New Guinea birds. I'm not permitted to run around locally exterminated. But I can compare mountains in New Guinea that happen to have the Lowell Mouse Babur with mountains that happen to have, not have, the lower mouse bapler, and I can look at the effect on the mountain mouse bambler to have or not to have the lower mouse baple. Those are natural experiments, and that's the

method, a relatively new method in social science. It's a powerful method with its own problems that has given the most insight into leaders in politics, business, sports, and even religion. What you say reminds me a lot of your UCLA colleague Judea Pearl, who was a former guest on the podcast, who really helped me understand how a lot of causal analysis can be hidden in the actual data, and you in principle have to do experiments to extract it, and in practice, in social sciences, you often have to rely on these like happy parallelisms between different things happening that are sort of natural experiments, like you said? Right.

Let me give you an example of a natural experiment. Sure. This is in the business world, a standard question in the business world, do CEOs, the heads of company, do they make a difference? They claim they do, and that's how they justify they're getting paid a million or 100 million or a trillion dollars. but students of business have debated whether CEOs really make a difference. There are a couple approaches to it.

One is statistical to an analysis of variance. You can look what happens when a leader, when a business leader gets transferred, gets fired, and goes to another company. you can then see, you can look at the effect of leaders separately from the company, and you can do an analysis of variance to separate on statistically the effect of leader, of the year, of the industry, and of the particular company. That's one method. The other method is the natural experiment.

In the business world, if we could experimentally kill leaders, well, that's not nice. If we could experimentally make them sick, that's also not. not nice, although it's not terrible. If we could experimentally make them sick, make them unhappy, distract them. How can we get them distracted? If we were an all-powerful experiment, we could get CEOs distracted by killing their only child or killing their spouse. That gets them really distracted.

Or we could kill their sibling. Psychologists will tell you that the death of a sibling isn't quite as bad, but it's next worst thing to death of a spouse or child. Or we could kill their parent, less bad than killing a sibling. Or we could kill their parent and more. Well, again, it's not nice to, but it happens as a natural experiment, and the data are very good. In Denmark, Denmark has something like 78,000 companies, and the Danish government has public statistics on all those companies and their CEOs, in addition in Denmark, if you go into a hospital, if you get hospitalized, or if you die in the hospital, it's part of public record.

So business school professors in Denmark just punched in the keys, and they found out for the CEO of every one of those 78,000 companies in Denmark, whether the CEO's child or only child or spouse or brother or sister died. and if so the CEO gets very distracted or still less distracted. And it turns out that when a close relative of a CEO dies, the company's profits take a hit for a year or two because the CEOs distract, and CEOs do make a difference. The biggest hit is if an only child or a spouse dies,

the next biggest hit, if a sibling dies, the lowest hit is if a parent dies, and the mother-in-law dies, the only death in the family that improves the profits of the business is the death of moral law, but it's not statistically significant. And so it's unsure. That's an example of a natural experiment. We can't go around killing relatives, but relatives die all over the place, and we can use that information.

effect on the company to need the effect of distraction of the CEO. And what's nice about this is it's not just qualitative. You're going to be able to say, or at least you're going to aspire to say, how much of the success or failure of a company can be attributed to features of the leader? That's right. For example, one detail study by a social scientist, Alison McKay, I think, but was her name. She looked only at companies where a CEO was transferred from one company to another. So that was not the entire database, but part of the database.

And what she concluded from those CEO transfers, if CEOs, if there are good CEOs and bad CEOs, a CEO transferred from one company to another may do well at both companies. And so you can then sort it out. Her conclusion was that CEOs account. for about 30% of the variation of profits and that the industry, some industries are more profitable than other industries. For example, perfume manufacturing or teenage t-shirts. That's a profitable industry, whereas public utilities is so tightly regulated.

It's not a terribly profitable industry. So, Alison McKay found that 30% to the profits are due to the leader, something like 20% each are due to the industry and 20% to the individual company. Croctrine Gamble has been a well-run company for 150 years, and even within its industry, soap, et cetera, industry. Crocterne Gamble is a relatively profitable company. And then the effect of different years, yes, they are a depression, but on the average, average the year, affects accounts were only about 3% of the variation in profits. That was Allison's study based on CEOs who switch companies. If you relax that requirement for CEOs to switch company, you have a larger database,

and in that case, you end up with a lower effect of CEOs. You conclude the CEOs, the California, maybe 15%, and that the industry and the, the individual company account for some of more, 20%. But what we can say is that on the overall, CEO and industry and company have major effects of comparable size, and the smallest effect on the average is of the year. Naturally, in 1930, the depression. That year on 2008 and 2002. But on the average, the year makes less of a difference than these other things.

So it's interesting you mentioned CEOs switching companies, because as you were speaking, I was thinking, how do you disentangle the impact of a competent CEO from the impact of a competent structure that chose a good CEO that would have been there anyway? Let's think how to answer that. A competent structure that chooses a good CEO. CEO, I'm hard-pressed to think of a major company that has had an unblemished or even a product. I'm serious about that. Yeah, no, I get it. Time and time again. So I would say that's a, that's very minor consideration. Okay, good to know.

All right, this is super helpful. And so we're, you know, rolling up our sleeves and trying to get into this world. I always say at this point in the podcast, thank goodness I'm a physicist because things are so much cleaner and easier to understand and your data is much messier, but it's fascinating.

So let's go back to the beginning of your book. At the beginning of your book, you tell us the story of a 1930 car crash that could have killed Hitler. And would that have made the world a different place? So we'll allow for spoilers here. What is the answer to that? I have to say, and this may sound shameless.

I just received the day before yesterday, the bad happens in my book. I received two copies, and one of those copies was immediately sequestered by one of my sons, only one copy. But last life before going to sleep, I just browsed the beginning of my book. Of course. And I had distance on it. It had been some time since I read it. And my book had it ups and downs.

There was a time when I was discouraged and I was thinking of that and boat. So I have some distance. And when I read the book last night, that's good. Good. First paragraph of the book is that on a date, I think, in March of 1930, There was a car accident. Hitler was being driven by his chauffeur. Hitler was in the right passenger seat of his chauffeur-driven car going into an intersection,

and by chance at right angles to Hitler's car came a big truck. The Hitler chauffeur and the truck driver ultimately braked, and accelerated to avoid the crash, the truck, Nevertheless, struck Hitler's car on the right side, the side with Hitler, and pushed it across the intersection up onto a barrier at the far side. And if the truck had been going a bit faster, it would have run over Hitler's, and Hitler would have died. In fact, the truck stopped just enough short. Hitler was somewhat wounded. He shouted to the people in the backseat, everybody okay, but he survived.

If Hitler had died in 1930, Hitler came to power in March 1933. If Hitler had died in 1930, I asked, would we still have the Holocaust and World War II that killed 50 million people? Hitler was clearly a distinctive person, distinctively evil person who not only was anti-Semitic and killed a few Jews and pogroms, but he had industrial scale killing of Jews and other people. Hitler was a mesmerizing speaker. Hitler was a genius at size and deceiving people. Hitler deceived Neville Chamberlain. He deceived so many foreign politicians.

He deceived German generals and German business people. He deceived his fellow knack. He was a brilliant deceiver. And he was a wistaker. He was convinced that he was going to die early. And so he wanted to do things quickly. And so he took risks. So the risk paid off like the march into the Rhineland War II.

Some of the risks did not pay off. the decision not to evacuate Stalingrad and the decision to launch the Battle of the Bulge. So Hitler was a distinctive person. One can argue, therefore, that Hitler made a difference. But the other side of it is that Germany lost World War I, and the Treaty of Versailles imposed stringent conditions on Germany, the 1923 hyperinflation in Germany, destroyed Germany's middle class, and it resulted from the occupation of the ruler by the

victims of World War I. So one can say that any leader of Germany, after World War I, a prime objective would have been to undo the effects of World War I. Germany had Lee Streiseman, the Foreign Minister Strzeman, sought to undo the effects of World War I peacefully. Hitler sought to undo the effects by war. What it means then is that it's a big question. Did Hitler make a difference? What did Hitler not make a difference? Even historians disagree.

Probably most historians view Hitler as uniquely evil, but a famous British historical, AJP Fitz-Taylor, one of the most famous British historians, wrote a book in which, without discovering any significant new fats about Hitler. He retold the story of Hitler's life, and he said Hitler was a normal German politician with normal goals of undoing the effects of World War II, and he was a normal person.

When Hitler fired his two top generals in 1937, he fired them because one of them was accused of homosexuality, and according to AJP Taylor, Hitler was genuinely morally outraged that this general was almost homosexual, and so Hitler fired this general. Well, it's difficult for most people to imagine Hitler being genuinely outraged about anything. AJP Taylor is a famous historian. Anyway, that's an open question. Did Hitler make the difference? Okay, good.

But it sounds like, you know, in the world of arguments we could make, we could make an argument that World War II would have happened, even without Hitler, but maybe it would have been a very, very different war overall. Right. And that, people often ask me, Jared, can you summarize in one sentence the conclusion of your book? My friend, oh, my God, summarize my three and a page book in one sentence. But there are some general lessons that one can come to from the book. Leaders sometimes make a difference. There are various ways in which they can make a difference. There are some leaders who are uniquely qualified to do some particular thing. In fact, my second chapter is about the founding president of Botswana, Soretti Kama,

who Botswana was for a while after independence, the fastest-going economy in the world. Soretti-Kamert's founding president was uniquely qualified to do it. Why? Because Botswana and Independence had only 21 university graduates. He would, if you're founding president, helps be a university graduate. He was one of them. In addition, he had been educated in the United Kingdom. He had a British wife, so he straddled both worlds, the European world, and the African world.

He was the chief of the biggest tribe in Botswana. And so when he, upon an independent said, let's abolish the power of the chiefs, he was the only chief as the strongest chief who could get away with abolishing the power of the chiefs. And similarly, diamonds were found in the power of the chiefs. And similarly, diamonds were found in Botswana on the land of his tribe. Any other tribe would have said, those diamonds are ours. They're not Botswana's. But Theretzikama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe on whose land the diamonds were found, he could say those diamonds are the property of Botswana, not of my chiefdom.

So he was uniquely qualified to be a leader. So there are other leaders, a few leaders, not many who are uniquely qualified be leaders. There are other leaders who are not uniquely qualified but who do things in an indistinctive way. For example, if we turn back to the business world, Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos founded an everything store, Amazon, is Jeff Bezos the only person who could have found it in everything store? Well, there are 350 million Americans, and you can't make an argument that Jeff Beezus was uniquely qualified to found an everything store. But there were other leaders who founded other everything stores, but they operate in different ways. Already before Jeff Bezos, there was eBay, which operates on a principle different from Amazon.

There was a Cleveland bookstore that operates on a different way from Amazon, things sells only books. There is Walmart, which is in everything store, but it doesn't do it online. It does it as a brick and mortar store. So one can say that some leaders make a difference not because they did what nobody else could have done, but that they did it in a distinctive way. And I think that's true of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. So those are two different ways in which a leader can make a difference. Yeah, that's very good.

And you've already mentioned some of the people that I wanted to ask you about, but I know we're not going to get a chance to go through all of the colorful personalities in your book. Let me just give you a chance. What are the other examples? What are the other case studies that you feel like are especially things that people should know about and learn about? Your favorite ones? Well, they're all my favorite ones and people should know about all of them. But if we want to, so we've talked about, we talked about, we talked about politics. We've talked about business. Let's talk about sports coaching. Sports coaches frequently get fired. The reason they get fired is a losing season. In Argentina, in the

Argentinian Football League, there is something like 400 firings every year. Similarly in the German football, German coaches last on the average, a year and a half. So coaches frequently get fired. At UCLA, we had a great coach, John Wooden, and John Wooden was followed by a series of basketball coaches. Every one of whom got fired, they got fired, even though their win-loss record was much better than the win-loss record of most American basketball coaches, but they didn't live up to John Wooden. It turns out that coaches get fired for a losing record, but there are many things that contribute to losing record besides the coach. A good player, just a did-d-da-t-t-tah, illness, to-d-tut-tah-tah. On the output, for statistical reason, you know this very well.

For statistical reason, if you have a random series, say you have dice, a dice with six numbers on, and you throw the dice, and one die, comes up with one on it. Statistically, the chances of five out of six the next row is it come up with better than one, because there are five equal-rated positions on the talk. Similarly, with sports coaching, as far as the coach is absurd, there are lots of

random factors. And so when you fire a coach, simply because a regression to the mean, just for random reasons, the coach gets fired for reasons that don't have much to do with the coach, and for just by chance, the next year is likely to be better. And so for a while, students of sports said that it's right to follow coaches, to fire coaches, because when you fire a coach on the average, the next year is better.

But then, what about throwing the dice? No, what you have to do is to compare the performance next year if you fire the coach with the performance next year if you do not fire the coach. And it turns out then that the effect of the coach is much less than if you do not do that testing. So coaches do make a difference, but you can do analysis of variance justice in the business world. And the conclusion that you come to is that coaches, they make more of a difference in college sports than in professional. Well, let's see if I got. In college sports, then in professional sports.

Because in professional sports, you have players who are there for a much longer time. So Bill Belichick. Tom Brady was around there for, what, 18 years. The Super Bowl successors were they due to Bill Belichick? Well, when Tom Brady went to, it looks as if the Super Bowl success had a lot to do with Tom Brady. So in the sports world, coaches do make a contribution to outcome, but they're not the overwhelmingly dominant contribution to outcome. They have a bigger effect in college sports than in professional sports. And for you and all of you who watched the World Cup,

So with my sons and with my wife in order to maintain my good relationship with my sons, I watched the World Cup. So Argentina lost the final game to Spain, and they lost it in an inexcusable way that students of sports coaching would have predicted. It turns out that the biggest effect that a footballer, coach, an American football coach, and probably a soccer coach has on the outcome, is not by an American football telling the players to throw forward pass or to run with it, and not as in soccer by training your players to kick the ball.

Well, the biggest effect is of teaching your players not to incur penalties. In that last game, it was on, the score was zero zero going into the last period. If it had ended up zero-zero, it would have gone to a penalty shootout. And because Argentina had a great goalie, Argentina probably would have won the penalty shootout. But the Argentine coach had not trained his players not to recur penalties. And so all the yellow cards without exception, all the yellow cards were Argentiners. Spain did not get a single yellow card. And when Wardo-Argent player got the second yellow, that was a red card, Argentina went down from 11 to 10 players and Spain was able to score.

So that's an example on yielding a non-obvious conclusion, that at least in American football, the biggest effect of the coach is not in telling a quarterback to throw forward pass, but instead is in training the players not to fumble and not to incur penalties. And that conclusion was reached not by sports analysts. It was reached by public policy, business school professors. The reason is that the waterfall sports is so good that business school professors test their methods by looking at sports outcomes. Well, exactly.

Sports is the most hyper data analyzed aspect of our lives because it's both we collect all the data, but then we also publish it. It's in the newspapers every morning, right? And it's a wonderful playground for that. So my next question would be, you know, since we can study the coaches so quantitatively, have we learned anything that translates to these other areas that you're talking about, politics and business and so forth, from thinking about what makes a good coach? Yes, yes, indeed. The methods used in the last 20 years to figure out whether CEOs make a job,

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

They were public policy professors who developed methods, developed sophisticated statistical methods for testing the effects of sports coaches. And then they applied those methods to testing the effects of CEOs and of politicians. And they found those methods that worked for coaches also worked for politicians. For example, it turns out that within the United States, governors of states have more power, make more of a difference than do mayors of cities. Mayors of cities, they're severely constrained in my city, Los Angeles. Most Los Angeles, they don't even bother to vote. We have an election coming up, and the turnout of Los Angeles voters and mayor elections is only 20%. Why?

Because we know that the mayor doesn't make that much. the mayor doesn't have that much power. But that insight, that quantitative insight, comes from business school professors who debug their methods on sports coaches. I want to go back to the penalty thing because I want to make sure that I get it clearly. The claim is not that the most important part of winning is having fewer penalties. It's that where coaches have the most leverage is in training their teams to have fewer penalties. That's right.

the biggest difference between coaches, naively, if you ask someone in sports, what's the difference between successful and less successful business football coaches? Most people would say, well, it's in knowing when how often to throw a word pass. And it's true that an 85-year-old, an 85-yard touchdown with a four, boy, that's really exciting. But what has a bigger, what a coach does that has bigger effect on the outcome of the game is by getting his players not to fumble and not to incur. That is very good. And I guess, you know, we're near the hour mark of the podcast now. So finally, we can hit

the fourth category right there in your title, which is the fun one, which is religion. Obviously, religion is sort of the apotheosis of the charismatic leader, right? Like, you can have a boring technocratic leader in a sports team or a business, but almost by definition your religious leader is going to have some charisma there. So what are the similarities and differences you think? Starting with the differences, perhaps the biggest difference is the one that you just mentioned. for a religious leader, a religious leader has to have charisma. In the business world or in the political world, it's often said that charisma is important,

but sometimes yes and sometimes no. Yes, it was charismatic. Winston Churchill was charismatic. Augusto Pinochet of Chile was nobody would call him charismatic. So charisma is one way to get ahead in the, political world, but there are other ways. You can instead terrify people. You can be good at guiding group discussions. There are other ways to be in fact, a political leader. But in the world of religion, you have to be charismatic. But someone who's charismatic, to be for a religion

to be successful in the spread around the world, you need more than charisma. You need to have good organization and often you need to have a good military organization, either offensive or defensive, because religions as they're developing get attacked. And so for example, the Mormons, as they arose, the Mormons got attacked. Joseph Smith developed basically a Mormon army to defend the Mormons and also to attack non-Mormons. In the case of early Christianity, when early Christianity rose as a Jewish sect, early Christianity was such a tiny group that there was no question of Jesus of St. Paul developing an army. It were centuries and centuries before Christianity developed an army.

And yes, by 1500 onwards, Christian armies were important to the spread of Christianity, by killing or forcing non-Christian. But in the rise of Christianity, in the rise of Christianity, and in the case of Joseph Smith, a new religion requires three figures who may be incorporating the same person. Jesus was the charismatic person. Jesus was not a military leader. Jesus was not a great organizer. St. Paul was the great organizer, and much later came Christian generals.

In the case of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith was the charismatic figure, but the great organizer was Brigham Young. So the difference between religion and the other spheres is that religion requires two separate sets of talent, charisma and organization, and often it requires a third set, namely military organization, whereas that's not in the business world. Jeff Bezos did not have an army that spread Amazon around the United States. Let's hope not. Yeah, that would be bad. But okay, good. That actually reminds me of something I should have asked earlier.

Are we even making sense when we talk about good leaders or bad leaders, or should we put more emphasis on right place, right time kind of considerations? Like, does being a good leader, is that a universal thing, or does it really depend on your match to the situation you find yourself in? Yes, an able leader can be effective only at certain times and places. And so an interesting three-way division. there are leaders who were aware of the importance of time and place and looked for the right time and place and stepped forward only when they figured out that the time and place was right for Charles de Gaulle twice, became president of France at the end of World War II, stepped down within two years because he figured that the time is not right to be president.

but he remained visible, and at the time of the 1958 Algerian crisis, he saw my moment has come, he was conscious of this, and he made himself available. So there were some leaders who select the attack. Bill Gates, prime example, of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both saw the January, what is, in 1976 or 1970, cover of popular electronics magazine that reported on an Intel microchip, there was much more powerful than anything previous. And until then, Bill Gates had told Paul Allen, the time is not right. Your interest in my computer, computer, but the time is not right.

But when Bill Gates saw that cover of popular electronics, he went to Paul Allen and said, now is the time we got that now because other people will do it. So, first of all, you have leaders who recognize the time and place, and choose it, choose it, make it. Secondly, you have leaders who recognize of the time and place is right, but there's nothing that they can do to engineer their stepping into the leadership. Winston Churchill, there was nothing. Winston Churchill did not provoke World War II by no means, but when Neville Chamberl and the British Prime Minister before him upon the invasion of France was under pressure to resign,

Winston Churchill was called in first by Chamber and then by the King and offered the Prime Ministership. And Churchill, in his five-volume biography, Roaouk says, on that evening when I was offered the prime ministerhip, I knew that this was the moment for which my entire wife was a preparation. I couldn't bring it about, but this was the right time falling into my lap, and I knew that I would succeed. So there were leaders who select the time. There were leaders who cannot select the time, but the time is offered to them, and they know it. And then the third case is leaders who happen to come step forward at the right time and place, although they have no idea that it was

the right time in place. Genghis Khan, the greatest land congressman. in world history, the Mongol chief, chief, chief, Genghis Khan, why did Genghis Khan succeed in building the largest land empire that the world has ever known? In the last 10 years, Denduconautus, students of tree rings, looking at tree rings in pine trees in Central Asia, found that the wettest time in Central Asia in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis's birth, but a wet time on the steps of Central Asia means lots of romew, rain for sheep and goats, which is food for the Mongols, and lots of rain for horses, but every Mongol warrior needs 10 horses. So if Genghis had been born 20 years later, or if we had

been born 200 miles to the south, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan, and Genghis Khan didn't know that he had this good good, similarly, Mark Zuckerberg. It's not that Mark Zuckerberg chose the year of his birth, and he chose to be a sophomore at Harvard in the year. 2002. He happened to be. The year of his birth was given to him by his parents. And in 2002, he had tried various startups at Harvard in his first year. In 2000, he tried another startup, which became Facebook. But he had no idea that the timing was perfect. But in fact, there were social media before Mark Zuckerberg. They hadn't been successful partly because of inadequate technology. Mark Zuckerberg happened to be born at the time of the right

technological advances. He didn't know it. So in short, sorry. Some leaders pick their time in place. Some leaders can pick it, but they know that it's the right time in place. And some like Mark Zuckerberg or Genghis Khan happened to be in the right time in place, but they have no idea that it's the right time in place. So then for the final question, You know, your Pulitzer Prize winning book was about how geography and environment really governed a lot of, or has explanatory power for a lot of world history. And now you've really dug into the role of these individuals who are having outsize influence on the organizations they lead. So where do we strike the balance?

Do you think that, do you think that as a society we still give too much credit to individual leaders, or are the leaders actually making even more of a difference than we suspect behind the scenes? This is why people who interview me regularly get frustrated. Of course, Garrett will give a click answer. And my answer to you is sometimes it makes a difference. Sometimes it doesn't make. Of course. But in my book, I explain the magic word, where it is discretion, not in the sense of being discreet and polite,

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

The CEO of a public utility, they're tightly ranked. You don't have much discretion. So in short, answer to your question is leaders can make a difference. One, if they have discretion, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Secondly, if they're uniquely qualified, Surrethi Kama was uniquely qualified, Rachel Carson was uniquely qualified. Most leaders, one cannot argue that they're uniquely qualified. They may make a difference if they want to do something that the public does not want to do,

but they are sufficiently persuasive that they get the public to do it. Franklin Roosevelt, getting the U.S. prepare for the World War II that the United States did not want. Charles de Gaulle getting the French prepared to pull out of Algeria, which the French did not want. And still another difference is if you've got lots of good, colleagues who want to do the same thing. Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister who followed Winston Churchill, he had very able colleagues, and if Clement Attlee had died in bed the next morning, one of his colleagues would have done the same thing.

Whereas Svetsi Kama or Rachel Carson, if she or he had died, there weren't colleagues standing around ready to do the same thing. So those are examples that there are circumstances under which a leader can make a difference, and the circumstances under which a leader does make a difference. And there it is to frustrate you and anybody else who interests me, but it's true. Interviews me, but it's true. I love it. No, I think that sometimes we have to enjoy and appreciate the complexities of the world.

That's not a bad lesson to have. So Jared Diamond, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you.