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

I’m Andrew Huberman, and I wanted to focus on Jared Diamond’s book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? You’re known for huge historical patterns, but here you take on leaders in politics, religion, business, and sports. What do you mean by a prophet?

For my purposes, a prophet is simply a religious leader. Whether somebody foretells the future is beside the point; I’m interested in leadership across those four domains.

Your interest is personal. You grew up during World War Two, with Eastern European Jewish family members lost in the Holocaust and your wife’s family marked by Auschwitz. Hitler raises the awful question of whether one person changed who lived and died.

Exactly. Hitler narrowly survived a 1930 traffic collision, then Stauffenberg’s bomb in 1944. Without Hitler, perhaps no Holocaust; if he had died in 1944, perhaps some of my wife’s relatives would have survived. Biographers reach opposite conclusions from the same record, so I use natural experiments. Hitler was gifted at deceiving people, and his antisemitism became murder at industrial scale; historians still debate whether he was unique or pursuing Germany’s existing aims.

Harry Truman became vice president for trivial political reasons, Roosevelt scarcely dealt with him, and then he inherited decisions including the atomic bomb. He made hard choices—the Berlin airlift, Korea, dismissing MacArthur—and didn’t avoid them because people would hate him.

I wondered whether effective leaders share a capacity to move forward without excessive concern about how they look. But you pushed back on personality theory.

Nonsense, if the claim is one personality recipe. Charisma is only one route: Stalin and Pinochet were not charismatic. There are perhaps 37 ways to lead effectively. Individuals usually do not account for big patterns across ten thousand years and whole continents; crops, domesticable animals, and geography do. But at local scale, in my lifetime, individual decisions can matter enormously.

I flooded a Cambridge lab with radioactive material after leaving a pump on overnight. Sir Brian Matthews told me I had been sloppy and must not repeat it. When my own students made serious mistakes, I remembered my close calls. One student my department wanted out became an outstanding researcher.

Religious success mixes person, organization, followers, and circumstance. Jesus had a universal message, Paul was an exceptional organizer, and Christianity arose within the Western Roman Empire. At another time or place, we might never have heard of him. Jim Jones shows why followers matter: before Jonestown, he helped desegregate Indianapolis and attracted people through admirable church ideals. Leadership involves who is disposed to follow.

Your fascination with diversity extends to languages, birds, and careers. You learned Italian at 61—your thirteenth language—and still read it daily and hold weekly conversations. You seem to use enormous variation as the route toward understanding.

I’ve been a lister since age three. Names are not empty labels; they anchor a network of information. A New Guinea bird name can call up its size, elevation, behavior, range, and relationship to similar species. I kept my physiology career, then developed careers in New Guinea birds and in history and geography. New Guinea was mostly miserable—dysentery, malaria, mites, monotonous food—but the birds made it necessary.

Birds are our easiest window onto much of biology because they rely heavily on sight and sound, as we do. Ecology, behavior, evolution, and biogeography have often been worked out most clearly with birds. Their calls can carry detailed information, including predator warnings.

Among 22 prominent leaders since World War Two, only Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew stepped down voluntarily. The others left through defeat, assassination, suicide, or coups. Once people have power and decide they are effective, relinquishing it is remarkably rare.

At 89, I think more about finite time. I want to synthesize what I know about bird colonization across New Guinea’s ten isolated mountain ranges, because knowledge could disappear with me. I’m also listening through Bach’s 210 church cantatas, about one each week.

Paul Ehrlich was right to call attention to environmental danger, though the issue is larger than population alone. Billions consume at higher rates while fisheries, forests, and soils are depleted. Nuclear danger, inequality in an interconnected world, and resource destruction are our largest threats.

Sports provide unusually good leadership data: outcomes are public and frequent. Coaches and chief executives matter, but institutions, industries, and chance account for much of the result. Firing a coach after a terrible season often produces improvement because results regress upward from a low point. John Wooden’s meticulous training was also a way of living; players learned about life, not merely basketball.

My advice is: do what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and what helps the world. Don’t let other people dictate trivial uses of your time—go to hell, literally, if they insist you must iron your shirts. I wanted to conduct orchestras, but discovered I could not anticipate the beat correctly. So I pursued what I could do well.

I’m grateful for the time and the example. Your curiosity across biology, birds, geography, history, music, and leadership makes this book another invitation to look more carefully at what shapes our lives.

Thank you. I’ve enjoyed this a lot. It has been a real pleasure to have this conversation with you.