Huberman Lab

0:00Dr. Jared Diamond

People regularly look for personal generalizations, personality generalizations about leaders. Perhaps the commonest generalization is that leaders have to be charismatic. Nonsense. Some leaders are charismatic. Stalin, Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, totally uncharismatic. There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader, of which charisma is one. And any question that you or anybody else would ask about how can we generalize about leaders' personality. There are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations, because there are different ways to be an effective leader.

0:43Andrew Huberman

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Jared Diamond. Dr. Jared Diamond is a professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles. He's done research in biology, anthropology, and frankly, in so many areas that there really isn't an appropriate title for him.

1:12Andrew Huberman

He's also a renowned author of books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel, for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He has also been awarded the National Medal of Science and a MacArthur Genius Award. Today, we discuss topics related to Jared's most recent book, which is about leaders and leadership. It is entitled Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings. We discuss political leaders, religious leaders, leaders in business, and in sports.

1:37Andrew Huberman

Today you're going to hear a lot of myths dispelled, including the common myth that charisma is requisite for successful leadership. And we discuss a lot of incredible biology. For instance, why observing birds— yes, birds— because of their reliance on sight and sound makes them one of the best windows into understanding human behavior and human nature. We also discuss Jared himself because, as you'll soon see, he is an incredible and very unusual human being.

2:02Andrew Huberman

We discuss his obsessive curiosity that's been there since childhood and how it's migrated from topic to topic, book to book, paper to paper, and what his process is for taking hard questions into the laboratory and going out into the wild, literally, to observe things in their natural state and then bring back all of that knowledge in a form that is unlike any other scientist or writer. So what follows is a discussion with an absolute luminary of science and public education, and it's one that I'm certain will inform, enchant, and inspire you.

2:32Andrew Huberman

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond. Dr. Jared Diamond, welcome.

2:53Dr. Jared Diamond

It's a pleasure to be with you.

2:54Andrew Huberman

Delighted to have you here. I'm such a fan of your books. Guns, Germs, and Steel was the first one I read, and I'm going to resist the temptation to ask about the topics in each of all of your books and mainly focus on your book, which is Profits, phonetically the same, but profits as in making profits and prophets as in who become prophets and what they are. Coaches and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? I think now more than ever, people are thinking about modern leadership and themes of past in leadership. First, I would like to know, what is a prophet? P-R-O-P-H-E-T.

3:32Dr. Jared Diamond

Prophet means, for my purposes, religious leaders, because my book about leadership looks at leadership in 4 spheres: the political sphere, the business sphere, sports, and finally religion. I use the word prophets to refer to religious leaders because it makes for catchy prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings. I don't care about whether they prophesy the future. It was simply my word for religious leaders.

4:05Andrew Huberman

Let's talk about leadership in each of those categories and people that stand out to you as the lightest and darkest in each of those categories. And we can go into the middle of the continuum if you want as well. But your book starts off talking about Hitler, which for the vast majority of people alive is considered one of the darkest leaders, uh, ever. Tell us about Hitler and what you learned about him that perhaps can inform how we think about leadership more generally.

4:35Dr. Jared Diamond

I was born in 1937, which meant that I grew up in World War II. Growing up in the United States, I was not bombed, I was not orphaned, but every day of my life that I can remember was formed by the war. My first memory, the first data thing that I can remember was the first photo that the US Army released of dead American soldiers. It was a famous cover of Life Magazine, 2 American soldiers dead face down on Buna-Gona Beach in New Guinea.

5:06Dr. Jared Diamond

So I grew up in the shadow of Hitler. My family is from Eastern Europe, Jewish from Eastern Europe. The last of my family, of course, disappeared in the Holocaust. I married into a Polish family. My wife's parents came to the US in 1948. My wife's mother had survived Auschwitz. Various members of my wife's family did not survive. And so my life and Marie's life had been formed under the shadow of Hitler. On top of that, then there were leaders, nonpolitical leaders who've shaped my life mostly for the good.

5:41Dr. Jared Diamond

There was a chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department. I left a rubber hose pump, water pump running all night to dry out radioactive isotopes. The pump broke. It flooded my lab. It flooded the lab below my lab. That was not a good choice of a lab to flood. It was the lab of Lord Adrian, who was the father-in-law of my thesis advisor and who who was the master of my college. The next morning, the chair of the physiology department, Sir Brian Matthews, called me in and I thought I was going to be expelled.

6:18Dr. Jared Diamond

Instead, he said, that was sloppy. Don't do that again. And that was the— so there was a leader who could have ended my career but didn't. There are other leaders who've done decisively good things for my career. There are a few people who failed to do anything, but they have not been leaders who did Those are the reasons for my personal interest in leaders, starting with the question of Hitler. If there had not been Hitler, would my family in Eastern Europe and would Marie's family still be alive?

6:50Andrew Huberman

How close were we to there not being an adult Hitler?

6:55Dr. Jared Diamond

There were 2 famous near-endings of Hitler's life. My book begins, the first paragraph of my book is about a car accident in 1930, 3 years before Hitler became chancellor when his limousine driven by a chauffeur was driving into an intersection in Germany. Hitler was in the passenger seat, the right-hand seat, and a big truck came into the intersection at right angles with Hitler's sedan. Both Hitler's chauffeur and the truck driver either braked or accelerated alternately, And the truck hit Hitler's car face on, pushed it up against the curb, and was about to ride up over the car crushing Hitler.

7:45Dr. Jared Diamond

And it came to a stop just before that. Hitler was injured, but he was not killed. If he had died in 1930, would there have been World War II and would there have been a Holocaust? And then the other famous almost was that In 1944, next to last year of the war, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who became disillusioned, attempted to kill Hitler. He brought a small suitcase with a bomb into the conference room at Wüstler, he sat down next to Hitler, put the suitcase, which he had primed the bomb, he put the suitcase just under Hitler's foot and the bomb went off.

8:43Dr. Jared Diamond

But just before the bomb went off, Hitler leaned forward. The result was that 4 other people in the room got killed. Hitler's eardrum was blown out. Hitler was seriously wounded, but he was not killed. But if Hitler had not leaned forward— That was 1944. war, would various members of my wife's family have survived? So those are reasons how close it came to Hitler not becoming chancellor and how close it came to World War II ending in 1944, World War II in Europe ending in 1944.

9:17Andrew Huberman

Was there anyone else that could have accomplished what Hitler accomplished?

9:22Dr. Jared Diamond

Historians argue about that. This illustrates the difficulties in figuring out whether leaders make a difference. The traditional method of historians and biographers is to write a biography. There are many people who've written biographies of Hitler. Most biographers of Hitler conclude that Hitler was unique in several respects. He was the most charismatic orator, unfortunately, of the 20th century. He was antisemitic.

9:55Dr. Jared Diamond

There were plenty of antisemites in Europe, not just in Germany, but in Poland. But Hitler, all those other antisemites killed Jews one by one. Hitler was the only one who got the idea of doing it on an industrial scale. Without Hitler, there probably would not have been a Holocaust. He was also brilliant at deceiving people. deceiving famously Neville Chamberlain at Munich, but he also deceived German politicians. He deceived German business leaders.

10:31Dr. Jared Diamond

He deceived German generals. He deceived his fellow Nazis. He was just brilliant at deceiving people. So those are the arguments for thinking that he made a difference, that without Hitler, there might not have been a World War II and there would not have been a been Holocaust. Most historians tend to believe that leaders don't make a difference. But in the case of Hitler, most historians would argue that Hitler did make a difference.

11:03Dr. Jared Diamond

The famous British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, wrote a biography of Hitler using the same facts. And with the same facts, A.J.P. Taylor came to the conclusion that Hitler was a normal German politician pursuing the goals of other German politicians, was true, but that there wouldn't have been any difference if Hitler had not been a leader. So those are the arguments about this, but that illustrates the weakness of the traditional biographic method.

11:33Dr. Jared Diamond

One's limited by the facts, but different people come to different conclusions with the same facts. That's why my book uses a different method, the method of natural experiments.

11:45Andrew Huberman

Who in your mind is the most unlikely leader that became a spectacularly successful leader either toward positive or destructive ends?

11:55Dr. Jared Diamond

There were many, many candidates for that. One candidate, the first, having been born in 1937, I grew up under Roosevelt, but the first American president in whom I became interested, because I was by then 8 years, Harry Truman. the most unlikely significant American president. He was selected as Roosevelt's 3rd or 4th vice president for trivial political reasons. He was a senator from Missouri, undistinguished. He had become senator through dishonest shenanigans.

12:32Dr. Jared Diamond

He was so insignificant that Roosevelt never met with him once Truman became vice president. And when Roosevelt died, Truman was totally unprepared. Truman didn't know about the atomic bomb, and yet the first decision that he had to make was whether to drop the atomic bombs. At the time, Truman was widely despised. I remember my own view of Truman. He, I, and others looked down on Truman, but in retrospect, we realized that Truman was courageous.

13:03Dr. Jared Diamond

He didn't care whether people hated him. He made— He was a man of principle. courageous decisions, the Berlin Airlift, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War, which people hated him for, firing General MacArthur, which people hated him for. And so when Truman stepped down, he was widely loathed. But in retrospect, gradually he's become appreciated as not equal to Roosevelt and Lincoln, but— The second tier of Ameri— a courageous American president who took decisions and didn't care that he was gonna be loathed because of the decision, his decisions.

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17:01Andrew Huberman

That's one form of introspection. I realize there are others, but is there a correlation there?

17:06Dr. Jared Diamond

I would say no. And this illustrates a broad point. People regularly look for personal generalizations, personality generalizations about leaders. Perhaps the communist generalization is that leaders have to be charismatic. Nonsense. Some leaders are charismatic. Stalin, Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, totally uncharismatic. There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader, of which charisma is one. And any question that you or anybody else would ask about how can we generalize about leaders' personality, there are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations because there are different ways to be a I'm

17:55Andrew Huberman

getting the sense that in your understanding of leaders and leadership, based on what you just said, that it's this weird confluence of circumstances, who's not available to lead better, perhaps charisma or lack of charisma, a weird constellation of things that give rise to history. And what we're experiencing now. And so for me, and perhaps I'm wrong about this, that contrasts a bit with my understanding of you based on your prior books, which is that you're trying to find thematic regularities.

18:33Andrew Huberman

You're trying to put structure on things that at the face of them are very complex, like how did we get here? How did cultures evolve, et cetera, and on and on. So in this exploration of leadership, How do you go from being able to explain each circumstance to some taxonomy that allows you to be satisfied? And I'm going to set up a parallel with something that we're going to look at later, which is birdwatching. I mean, every bird is different, but every bird belongs to a particular category and has particular features.

19:09Andrew Huberman

And in many ways, I'm thinking about leaders and leadership the same way. What is satisfying to you? What level of understanding and consistency of ideas is satisfying?

19:19Dr. Jared Diamond

There are generalizations that I came to in writing about leaders, but I would say just as background, people often ask me, Jared, your book about leaders now seems to be the opposite of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared, your book Guns, Germs, and Steel was about big patterns. There was nothing about individuals. Instead, it was about domestication and the shapes of continents. Does that mean that you've changed your mind and you now recognize the role of individuals?

19:53Dr. Jared Diamond

And my answer to that is no. Guns, Germs, and Steel is about patterns of history on the continents over the last 10,000 years. And over the last 10,000 years on whole continents, I can't think of any individual who's made a difference. There was no individual who was responsible for the Fertile Crescent jumpstarting civilization. The Fertile Crescent jumpstarted civilization. Why? Because the Fertile Crescent was where the most productive wild plants, peas, wheat, barley, the most productive wild animal, cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse lived.

20:31Dr. Jared Diamond

And so in Guns, Germs, Steel, there's nothing at all about individuals. Whereas my book about leadership is about what people have done during my lifetime, usually on local scales. And so it is about individuals, whereas Guns, Germs, and Steel was not at all about— I haven't changed my mind. It's that I'm looking at completely different sorts of questions now in Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings compared to Guns, Germs, and Steel.

20:57Andrew Huberman

Is it a leap to say that Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings is in some ways an autobiography of the things that impacted your life along the way?

21:13Dr. Jared Diamond

In motivation, yes. In content, no. In motivation, yes, the role of Hitler in my family's life and my wife's life. But the content of the book is all divorced from me. In the introduction, I think I do mention that Sir Brian Matthews saved, as a leader of the Cambridge Physiology Department, saved my career in physiology. But then once I launch into politics and once I launch into the business world and once I launch into the sports world and religion, no, it's all stuff I haven't contributed to any of those 4 areas.

22:02Dr. Jared Diamond

Now, in the epilogue of the book, I do ask what are the areas, other areas that are waiting for exploration by the method of natural experiments. And I mean science, which I am a scientist, art and music, I am a musician, military history, I'm very interested in military history, social unrest. I'm hoping that in the future people will apply these questions of leadership to things that involve me personally, particularly music and science, but that's for the future.

22:35Andrew Huberman

You've mentioned this story about flooding the laboratory with— I should point out, I heard you say radioactive isotope water. What is your takeaway from that particular professor's response, and has it made you more forgiving of other people's mistakes?

22:52Dr. Jared Diamond

I've not been one to jump on other people for their mistakes. Well, I've made plenty of mistakes. I've had very close calls myself. I've done things that could have ended my career on the spot, such as that. There were other things that could have ended my career on the spot. So I'm not inclined to blame other people for their mistakes. I recall a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer mentioned that Oppenheimer, he committed theft and he could easily have been fired and his career might've been ended. But the theft was overlooked, and so he went on to develop his career.

23:37Andrew Huberman

It's interesting how when we are very low on a hierarchical ladder, like in academia in its traditional days anyway, that people hold tremendous power, obviously, to impact us and whether we move forward or not. But it's always reassuring when something like the forgiveness of this professor, if people can hear that, because I think a lot of people associate power leadership with— here I'm generalizing again— with a sort of a lack of tolerance for imperfection, lack of tolerance for things that could threaten the whole department in this case. So it's a very sweet story on the one hand, but I imagine it didn't happen a second time. There's also that, right?

24:25Dr. Jared Diamond

For 36 years, I was professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School doing laboratory experiments. And so I had graduate students and postdocs. And quite a few of the graduate students and postdocs screwed up. They made big mistakes. I remember my second graduate student, my department wanted to expel him because he didn't do well on an exam. I convinced my department to let him stay and he turned out to be an outstanding researcher. A couple of others of my students had close calls. But again, I'm reminded how close I came myself to having my career ended, and people forgave me and my career developed very well.

25:19Andrew Huberman

Yeah, I would say so.

25:21Dr. Jared Diamond

Since I was forgiven, it behooves me to forgive my students.

25:26Andrew Huberman

I love it. And I'm sure many people appreciate that. It's a very different picture of academia than I think most people get. So thank you for that. Religious leaders, who in your mind stood out as important enough to feature prominently in the book?

25:44Dr. Jared Diamond

In the book, I have 2 chapters on religious leaders. The first chapter looks at 3 religious leaders in the 19th century United States. Because we got lots of detailed information about them. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion. Ann Lee, the founder of Shakers. Jim Jones, the founder of Jonestown. So we have a lot of information about them. The second chapter on religion looks at Jesus. We have minimal information about Jesus.

26:27Dr. Jared Diamond

We have no contemporary information whatsoever about him. The first information that we have about him is the letters of St. Paul and the Gospel according to St. Mark, both of which follow his death by about 20 years. So there's no contemporary information about him. With Jesus, Did Jesus make a difference? Well, if you read the New Testament, talks about names, 6 other messiahs. Jesus was not the only messiah. There were lots of people then who said, I'm the messiah.

27:03Dr. Jared Diamond

And 6 of them are named in the New Testament. A couple of them were killed by the Romans. John the Baptist had his head cut off. Jesus was killed, but this was the Western Roman Empire. the most powerful political entity of Western Eurasia, just the right place to found a major religion. Jesus, of course, could not foresee that 1,467 years after his death, Columbus would sail the ocean blue and launch the European conquest of the world, spreading the European religion.

27:41Dr. Jared Diamond

But the European religion was Christianity. Why? Because Christianity was the religion of the Western Roman Empire, the most powerful entity at the time. So if Jesus had been with the same properties in the Sudan, we wouldn't know about Jesus. If Jesus had been a religious leader in Western Europe, 100 BC, we wouldn't know about him. He was the right place and right time.

28:08Andrew Huberman

He definitely has the highest H-index of any religious leader.

28:12Dr. Jared Diamond

The right place and the right time. And I believe that Christianity is today the world religion with the largest number of adherents.

28:21Andrew Huberman

I know you try not to generalize, but is there anything specific about Jesus, the person that we do know with almost certainty or with certainty that spoke to his effectiveness? Or was it, you said right place, right time, but that seems necessary but not sufficient.

28:39Dr. Jared Diamond

Right. There were other people at the right place in the right time. There were those 6 other prophets mentioned in the New Testament. And they were the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why was a world religion founded by Jesus and not by the leader of the Essenes? Well, there are a couple of things. One, Jesus's message and personal qualities. He had a universal message for all people. It was not just a message for the Essenes and was not just a message for Jews.

29:18Dr. Jared Diamond

Yes, Jesus was Jewish, but his message was not addressed to just the Jews. It was a universal message of those religious leaders of the Roman Empire at that time. That was a big thing in his favor. And another thing in his favor was that a religion needs not only a charismatic founder, but it also needs organizer. In some cases, the organizer and the charismatic founder are the same person. Muhammad was a great organizer and also charismatic.

29:53Dr. Jared Diamond

The Mahdi of the Sudan was a brilliant organizer and brilliant general, also a brilliant religious leader. Jesus died too early. He was not the organizer. The organizer was St. Paul. St. Paul was a great organizer, just as with the Mormon religion. Joseph Smith was the charismatic founder of the Mormon religion. even in his lifetime, he had his weaknesses as an organizer. And he was then lynched. The organizer was Brigham Young, who was a great organizer.

30:22Dr. Jared Diamond

So your question, why Jesus? Universal message. And he had the good fortune that he was then followed by a great organizer, St. Paul. And he was in the right place, the Western Roman Empire, at the perfect time.

30:36Andrew Huberman

And Columbus, obviously, was able to propagate his ideas far, as you pointed out, with the desire to still avoid generalizations. What the picture I'm getting is that you need a leader, you need an organizer. Sometimes the leader is the organizer, but oftentimes it sounds like it, there's someone else or other people who can help organize the message. We see this in science quite often, especially in the biological sciences, pairs.

31:07Andrew Huberman

Of, um, well, uh, your advisor Hodgkin-Huxley won the Nobel Prize. They're famous for describing the biophysics of the action potential. Hubel-Wiesel won the Nobel Prize. It's very common that there's this pairing and, and having known David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel a bit, uh, Torsten's still alive. There's often a personality, uh, complementarity there too. One tends to be a little bit more outspoken, one a little bit more, uh, you know, Watson and Crick.

31:37Andrew Huberman

I'm sure there are just as many examples that don't fit. But in thinking about leaders, not just religious leaders, can we make any kind of generalization about pairings, 2 very complementary people that are especially effective in getting escape velocity on their leadership, their message?

31:59Dr. Jared Diamond

I don't think so. In the case of religion, it's not just pairings, but it's often triplets. Namely, to launch a religion, you need charismatic founder, you need an organizer. But generally, always when you found a new religion, there is pushback from existing religions. And often that pushback is violent so that often new religions have had to defend themselves have had to have generals. For example, the Mahdi Muhammad was an outstanding general as well as organizer and charismatic.

32:45Dr. Jared Diamond

The Mahdi of the Sudan who established an empire in East Africa towards the end of the 19th century, great general. He led hundreds or thousands of Sudanese tribesmen, with just sticks to wipe out a British Egyptian army of 7,000 with machine guns. Great general, great organizer, charismatic. But in other spheres, in science, there are scientists who are large-scale organizers. My thesis advisor, Alan Hodgkin. Alan Hodgkin, great scientist.

33:25Dr. Jared Diamond

He did not organized 50 people into a lab group. Allan Hodgkin, his strategy was to have one PhD student at a time. While I was his PhD student for 3 years, he did not have another PhD student. He did become Master of Trinity College and he was an effective Master of Trinity College. But there are scientists who are also outstanding organizers. Gerald Adelman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on figuring out how antibodies operated.

33:55Dr. Jared Diamond

Gerald Adelman had, I believe, something like 50 postdocs. And a friend of mine made a discovery that so-called bent Jones proteins in the kidney, a discovery that was crucial to figuring out how antibodies operate. But my friend operated alone. He did not have 50 postdocs. And so when my friend made the tactical mistake of giving a lecture about his discovery of bent Jones proteins before he had published, Gerald Adelman was in the audience and I'm told then immediately told his lab, switch everything.

34:37Dr. Jared Diamond

And his 50 postdocs went in there and they figured out how antibodies operated. Gerald Adelman got the Nobel Prize and my friend did not get the Nobel Prize, but Gerald Adelman was a very effective organizer and fundraiser.

34:51Andrew Huberman

And big personality.

34:52Dr. Jared Diamond

Yes. Yes. I met him on 2 occasions. Yes, he was a big personality.

34:59Andrew Huberman

Yeah, he ventured into neuroscience after immunology. Uh, and, uh, yeah, big ideas. Um, big lab, big ideas. So there are just as many, uh, exceptions, uh, to the, to the statements I'm making, I'm realizing, as there are, um, things that, that meet it. I was surprised that you mentioned Jim Jones. Um, and most people perhaps have heard of the Jonestown Massacre, uh, the top contour of that in my mind is a bunch of people left the country to follow this cult leader and drank poison, and it was mass suicide.

35:35Andrew Huberman

When I hear about cults and I hear about cult leaders, for some reason I default to thinking more about how impressionable the cult followers were rather than how persuasive the cult leader was. David Koresh and the Branch Davidians was, you know, in my mind, the burned down the, the, the structure, killed everybody inside. And when I hear Koresh's lectures, they, they have no impact in persuading me of anything except that he was nuts.

36:04Andrew Huberman

When you think about an effective cult leader, I think most people perhaps default to that they're preying on the vulnerable. But is there a world where those effective cult leaders could have done something else in the context of regular society and been effective leaders? Or is it there's something about the pairing, the dysfunctional pairing of the person prone to be a cult follower and the cult leader?

36:30Dr. Jared Diamond

Interesting question. A leader needs personal characteristics that will enable her or him to lead. They may be charisma, they may be being able to terrify people, they may be able to persuade people. On the one hand, there's the leader, and on the other hand, there are the followers. Not everybody is a follower. There are some people who are prone to follow charismatic people, and there are other people, lots of people who are not going to follow even the most charismatic people.

37:04Dr. Jared Diamond

Hitler. There were the Germans who followed Hitler, were persuaded by Hitler, but the Nazis never got a majority in an election. The majority of Germans were not persuaded by by Hitler. Jim Jones of Jonestown, notorious for founding a colony in Guyana, and the colony ended in the largest mass suicide in American history. 900, 931 people drank punch poisoned with cyanide. But Jim Jones, he can't be written off as a crazy.

37:44Dr. Jared Diamond

He He led the desegregation of Indianapolis. He attracted people by the noble ideals of the church that he founded in Indianapolis. The people who followed him were not a random assortment of people. They were predominantly poor people, predominantly old people. A lot of them were African Americans. They tended not to be highly educated people. The People's Temple, as it was called, required the charismatic leader. This is really an interesting point that you raised, but it also required people who were disposed to be followers.

38:33Andrew Huberman

I didn't realize he led the desegregation of Indianapolis.

38:38Dr. Jared Diamond

If he had died before he moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco, if he had died in his first couple of years in San Francisco, he was appointed one of the housing commissioners for San Francisco. He attracted many idealistic people in San Francisco, but he was gradually getting more and more crazy. But this illustrates the point that you make, which is an interesting point, that one has to inquire not just about leaders, but also about followers.

39:11Dr. Jared Diamond

Who is disposed to follow? In the case of the Nazis, yes, it was clear that there were Germans who were disposed to follow Hitler. In the case of Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my parents voted 3 times for Roosevelt and once they voted against Roosevelt. My parents and other Roosevelt were not crazy sick sick people. And Winston Churchill, the people who voted for Winston Churchill were not crazy, crazy sick people.

39:44Dr. Jared Diamond

In that case, one cannot look to the pathology or the strange qualities of their followers as one can in the case of Jim Jones.

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40:28Andrew Huberman

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40:53Andrew Huberman

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41:34Andrew Huberman

We'll leave Jesus out of this because that's an obvious one. But in the case of Jim Jones, you said he had a church. Did he still talk about the existence of God? Did he try to leverage God to make people convinced that he was humble to God? Or was he saying that he was really the apex of power and understanding? And I suppose we could apply this to just pretty much anyone we've discussed or anyone else. Is this an informative dividing line?

42:05Dr. Jared Diamond

Jim Jones certainly did not deny God and did not claim to be superior to God. Here's another one. Are there traits shared by leaders? And I mentioned that there are different ways to be an effective leader. Charisma, In, I think it was the 3rd chapter of my book, I have a table in which I pulled together 22 outstanding political leaders of the period from World War II onwards. And I asked myself, what generalizations can we reach about these 22 leaders?

42:51Dr. Jared Diamond

The 22 leaders, the obvious candidates, you can argue about them, but Stalin, Anwar Sadat, Mussolini, Hitler, et cetera, et cetera. I asked myself, are there any qualities shared by all of these leaders? And the surprise for me was that of these 22 leaders, there were only 2 who stepped down voluntarily. Nelson Mandela, the founding post-apartheid leader of South Africa. I think in his 80s, and he retired voluntarily as prime minister.

43:28Dr. Jared Diamond

Then Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, served as prime minister, might be as long as 30, might be as long as 40 years, but he stepped down voluntarily. But of the other 20, those were the only 2 out of 22 who stepped down voluntarily. All other major leaders were either assassinated, Anwar Sadat, or committed suicide, Hitler, or they were voted out of office, Winston Churchill, or they were thrown out by a coup.

44:04Dr. Jared Diamond

Which means that in politics, once you've become a powerful leader and you've come to the conclusion that you are an effective, powerful leader, you are very unlikely to step down voluntarily. Only 2 out of 22 did it. So that's a generalization that I had not anticipated.

44:29Andrew Huberman

Yeah, I suppose it's a lifestyle hit too. Nobody wants to go backwards in terms of their comforts. But I am surprised that some people have the vigor to continue to occupy these very high-demand, find spots despite aging and fatiguing. I mean, you clearly don't slow, but the, uh, uh, you know, but, uh, we'll talk about the fact that you're teaching yourself Italian now. Is that right? Are you teaching yourself a new language? Did I hear that correctly?

44:59Dr. Jared Diamond

I learned Italian. Italian was my, the last of my 13 languages. I learned Italian.

45:04Andrew Huberman

Just 13.

45:05Dr. Jared Diamond

When I, when I was 61 years old. I read Italian every day, all my leisure, reading is in Italian. I don't do leisure reading in English. I read Italian every day. And once a week, I have a 2-hour Italian conversation with my Italian professor, who's a professor at USC.

45:21Andrew Huberman

What inspired you to learn 13 languages? Is it fun for you, or do you— and/or do you enjoy the challenge as part of the enticement of learning another language?

45:32Dr. Jared Diamond

My mother was a talented linguist. I just love learning languages. In my school, Required us to to study Latin for five five years. I loved it. We had the alternative of studying electives, either Greek or biology. I figured I'm going to be doing biology for the rest of my life. I will now take so I I spent three years learning Greek. I can still recite the beginning of the "Mena edethe a peleido akale." Then In college, I learned German just before— my mother helped me with that just before entering college.

46:11Dr. Jared Diamond

In college, this was the time of Sputnik, so I learned Russian, I learned Spanish. And then my first summer after college, I spent the summer in Finland. The Finnish language is a non-Indo-European language. It's a really difficult language. When I went to Finland, I did not have a Finnish grammar, but I was hitchhiking around in Finland. And at that time in Finland, summer of 1959. Very few Finns spoke English. In order to hitchhike, I had to start learning Finnish.

46:43Dr. Jared Diamond

And I ended up in a national park in northern Finland where I hiked into a hut that was being looked after by 4 Finnish soldiers. The 4 Finnish soldiers didn't speak any language except Finnish. And I'm with them for several days. They teach me Finnish. By demonstrating things, cup. They picked up a cup. The word for Finnish word for cup was kuppi, and then Finnish instead of having prepositions, it has postpositions, cases.

47:16Dr. Jared Diamond

So when you want to say the cup is on the table, kuppi pudella. When you want to say I'm putting the cup onto the table, pudella se. When you take the cup off the pudella ste. So these four Finnish soldiers, they demonstrated for me by putting cups onto and off of. I just loved it. And I seriously considered dropping out of science. After I'd been to Finland, I met my parents in Paris. They came to Europe, saw them for the first time in a year.

47:48Dr. Jared Diamond

And I was seriously considering dropping out of science and becoming a simultaneous translator. I was going to go to Switzerland to become a translator. Fortunately, my father, he gently said, Maybe it's a bit early to drop. I know science is frustrating for you now, but you've been doing it for only a year. Why don't you give yourself another 6 months? And after 6 months, if the experiments aren't going well, you can be a translator.

48:17Dr. Jared Diamond

But I loved learning Finnish. And then when I went to New Guinea, New Guinea has 1,000 languages. The first New Guinea people that I worked with were the Fore tribe, famous for kuru, laughing sickness, first prion disease. And at that time there was a New Guinea trade language, is a New Guinea trade language called Tok Pisin. So I was able to communicate with Tok Pisin, but I just loved learning Fore from a couple of Fore.

48:49Dr. Jared Diamond

And I remember asking my Fore informant, I was trying to figure out the word for we. I'd already learned the word for I, nage. So I asked my foray informant in Talk Vision, I, nage. So we, all the same one of them, mipela. And he said, then he gave me a word for we. And then I responded, oh, we? And he said, no, nage, kasige. It turns out that that foray has a dual. English has singular and plural, I and we. But among European languages, Slovenian and ancient Greek have a dual, namely separate pronouns for two of us and three of us.

49:42Dr. Jared Diamond

So, for example, if if I'm I'm talking the two of us, we do this. But if there were a third person here, it would be a different pronoun. In foray, we would be casi. Long and ways, I just loved learning languages. I've always loved languages.

49:59Andrew Huberman

It seems you love the puzzle of it. You love the application of it, given that once you learned Italian, you still have these conversations in Italian for a couple hours a week. Once again, I'm struck by how, despite the tremendous variation in the different languages, for instance, that there's something about— I'm not trying to play psychologist here, but there's something about your mind where you're— it seems you're very comfortable with immense amount of informational diversity within a category like language or leaders, most people come in and they try and simplify to clarify.

50:35Andrew Huberman

But you have this, it seems your mind goes to, let's find the widest range of variation possible, and from that, we're going to extract some deeper understanding. This may occur to you, but it's a highly unusual way of doing things. I mean, in biology, we have lumpers and splitters, as we say. I teach neuroanatomy, so you can lump or you can split. You can say brain, or we can start dividing it, and you can divide everything right down to the subdivisions of the mitochondria if you want, right?

51:01Andrew Huberman

So you have to pick your, your level of analysis. But we tend to put frameworks, nomenclatures, and try and name genes in ways that we can think about other genes that are similar. Your mind works in a very different way. And what I'd like to know is, has it always been that way? Have you looked at the taxonomy of, of stuff in the world and said, That's crazy. Why do they organize it that way? Maybe we should look at it through the most detailed lens and from that extract clarity.

51:32Dr. Jared Diamond

I've been that way only since age 3. My mother, who was a teacher and loved teaching, mom taught me to read when I was 3 years old. And so I began keeping a notebook. I've still got my 3-year-old notebook. In my notebook, I made lists. I made lists of the names of rivers, the names of animals, the names of animals of the Rocky Mountains, the names of birds of Europe. I was a lister. This is embarrassing, but I listed the numbers of streetcars on the Boston streetcar system.

52:05Dr. Jared Diamond

I had long lists of the numbers. I love making lists. And I've got a lot of mileage in biology out of making lists. After my PhD, I was a membrane biologist, and among my contributions to membrane biology, I did the largest study ever carried out of the permeability of biological membrane to uncharged molecules, non-electrolytes. I and my first postdoctoral student, we measured the permeability of rabbit gallbladder to 210 non-electrolytes.

52:43Dr. Jared Diamond

They're all organic chemicals and there's lots of detail there. There are branched nonelectrolytes, there are non-branch nonelectrolytes, and there are ones with oxygen groups and there are ones with sulfur groups. So there's lots of detail. I loved the project with those 200 nonelectrolytes. Then when I went to New Guinea to start to study birds, I've been studying New Guinea birds since since 1964. New Guinea has about 600 bird species.

53:16Dr. Jared Diamond

I've encountered and gotten to know most of them. When I'm falling asleep at night, often I'll recite to myself lists of New Guinea birds. Sometimes I'll recite them by their foreign names, the Mabisena, the Pasakekiame, the Kenmamitoto, the Izuwanadaba. Sometimes I'll recite them by their Latin names, Sericornis papuensis, Sericornis perspicua, Nicolaudus, Sericornis nui. I just love making lists. But one of my teachers, one of my influential teachers, Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr loved making lists.

53:53Dr. Jared Diamond

And he and I spent 30 years preparing a book together on the birds of Northern Melanesia, the islands east of New Guinea. Ernst and I were very compatible. Both of us loved making lists. Whenever a question would come up, Ernst would say, let's make a list. And he would make a list and I would make a list. And then we would go over that list. list of all the mountain birds of Northern Melanesia. What generalizations are there about the mountain bird?

54:21Dr. Jared Diamond

There's a lot of scientific mileage that I've gotten from making lists, which I've done ever since I was 3 years old.

54:28Andrew Huberman

It's the exact opposite way that Richard Feynman talked about how to look out at the world. He actually used the very example of if you see a bird in the woods and somebody says, that's like a whatever, whatever thrush. He said knowing the name doesn't help you understand it, but I'll say, based on spending a lot of time thinking about the names of and the connectivity of different brain structures, often there's a way of naming things in a field that actually tells you a lot about the functionality.

55:00Andrew Huberman

Like in neuroscience, for instance, we, the first name in retinogeniculate, it tells you what the origin structure and the recipient structure are. So like the names actually matter. Yeah. They tell you a lot more than just this is different than that. So as you made these lists and as you recite these lists when you're falling asleep, are you also able to call to mind the functional distinctions between these? Is that simply the way that you batch information, or is it that the lists and the names are, are, have their own unique value that's independent from that?

55:33Dr. Jared Diamond

The names are the, the anchor for a lot of information. When I reside at night. Cerroconus norhousi. Cerroconus norhousi, the large scrub wren. What about it? Well, it's the larger of 2 birds in an altitudinal sequence. It's the larger of 2 coexisting species which are very similar. So similar that the Pasig-kiabi and the Mabasena, I couldn't tell them apart until New Guineans explained to me the differences in their behavior.

56:07Dr. Jared Diamond

So there's a lot of information that's associated with the name. And addition, the name itself has it. Cerrocornis means that that bird belongs to the genus Cerrocornis. And in the genus Cerrocornis is also Cerrocornis virgatus, which is the low elevation equivalent of Cerrocornis norvegicus. But there's also Cerrocornis perspicillatus, which is the small-bodied scrub wren that shares the same altitude range as norvegicus.

56:39Dr. Jared Diamond

So there's information that goes along with the I

56:41Andrew Huberman

mean, in the world of science, you and I both know there are people who pick one thing and they just drill there, sometimes for an entire career or for 5 or 10 years at a time. And then there are people that try and throw their arms around enormous batches of information. Clearly, you're in the latter category. And so once again, I'll ask, was this always your tendency? You wanted to know all the information?

57:03Dr. Jared Diamond

Basically, yes. I mean, I've always been interested in lots of things. I was fortunate to go to a secondary school that gave me options to study lots of things. My secondary school, although I expected to go into science, my secondary school had a great history teacher, better than all the history teachers I had at Harvard College. Wonderful Latin and Greek teacher. Then once I got my PhD in physiology in Cambridge, England and returned to the United having gotten my PhD in salt and water transport by the gallbladder.

57:39Dr. Jared Diamond

In retrospect, I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but in retrospect, I realized that I was now understanding with horror that I was expected to devote myself to the gallbladder for the rest of my life. But that just went against everything that I had done from age 3 onwards. And so I shopped around for another career. I seriously considered making another career in pre-Columbian ceramics. I seriously considered becoming a conductor of an orchestra.

58:09Dr. Jared Diamond

I didn't have the insights into pre-Columbian ceramics. To be a conductor, you have to be able to ignore time lags, and I couldn't ignore time lags. But I had become a birdwatcher at age 7, and when I came back to Boston after my getting my PhD. In my first summer, I and a college classmate, the college classmate who was a great birdwatcher, we spent the summer in Peru. What do you do in Peru? We climb mountains, we watch birds.

58:44Dr. Jared Diamond

The next summer, we went together to New Guinea. New Guinea's the wildest place in the world, but New Guinea also has the most wonderful birds. And so I developed a second career in birds. And then I developed a third career in history and geography. So I've had 3 careers. My career in laboratory physiology eventually closed down in the year 2002. Why? Because when our twin sons, my wife and I have twin sons, they were born in 1987.

59:18Dr. Jared Diamond

When our twin sons were born, I realized the future of Max and Joshua is not going to depend upon gallbladders. It's going to depend upon history and geography. And so gradually, I began spending more of my time in history and geography. I was less interested in gallbladders. And finally, with great difficulty, I got UCLA to transfer me from being professor of gallbladder physiology in the medical school to being professor of geography in the college.

59:46Dr. Jared Diamond

I've still kept up the 2 careers in history and geography at the same time as I was writing my book on leaders. At the same time, I've also been writing papers on my work on New Guinea birds. I think a week ago Friday, I completed a long paper on the birds of the Wondaman Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. Next year, I want to do a paper on the birds of the Bawani Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. And because I'm 89 years old, I have to figure what do I— my remaining time is finite.

1:00:19Dr. Jared Diamond

What am I going to do with my remaining time? One of the things that I want to do with the my remaining time is to synthesize my work on New Guinea birds by looking at bird distribution on the 10 isolated mountain ranges of New Guinea. What generalizations can I recognize about the birds that are good colonists? So that's what I want to do for the next, the remaining 10 years of my life.

1:00:42Andrew Huberman

I have to say that despite having colleagues who have a lot of interests, it's very rare to encounter somebody who's been successful in several different domains of serious you know, scientific exploration, much less writing books about them as well. And did you at some point give yourself permission to move fields? It's not common, as we know, in science for people to do that. And if people do it, they tend to do it somewhat cryptically and then, or, and gradually.

1:01:09Andrew Huberman

And maybe this is also not to pry into your personal life, but it's one thing to decide, well, you know, I'm, my twins are arriving and, you know, maybe I'll switch fields, but there's a spouse there who's probably thinking, uh, uh, Do you have tenure? How are we going to pay the bills? So I imagine there was likely support, or maybe you're just very defiant and you just follow your curiosity.

1:01:31Dr. Jared Diamond

There were the career issues and there were the issues of interest. The issues of interest were that ever since I was 3 years old, I've been interested in lots of stuff. And I realize in retrospect that among my life crises, One of my life crises was after I got my PhD, realizing with horror that I was expected to do one thing for the rest of my life, but that was not me. And it took some effort to carve out a second career in birds.

1:02:04Dr. Jared Diamond

I had a postdoctoral fellowship. Most postdoctoral fellowships bind you to do one thing. I was in the biophysics lab of the Harvard Medical School, but I was fortunate that my postdoctoral fellowship was— with the Harvard Society called the Society of Fellows. I was a junior fellow at Harvard, and as a junior fellow, I had freedom. I could tell the boss of my biophysics laboratory, I'm going to New Guinea for 3 months this summer to study New Guinea birds.

1:02:36Dr. Jared Diamond

I didn't ask his permission. I just said, I'm doing it. Now, he could have fired me and he could have said, well, if you want to do that, get out of the biophysics lab. But I was doing good work in biophysics. And so he was willing to tolerate my going off to New Guinea for 3 months. Then when I moved to UCLA, the crucial piece of my negotiation with moving to UCLA where I was offered a professorship, associate professorship in the physiology department, the dean of UCLA was the longest serving medical school dean in the United— Sherm Melankoff, wonderful person.

1:03:16Dr. Jared Diamond

He was offering me a job in the physio. I told Sherm, yes, but I'm interested in New Guinea birds and you gotta understand that I intend to— the last several years I've spent 3 months every summer working on New Guinea birds and I wanna continue my work on New Guinea birds. And if I accept your position, will you tolerate my continuing to work on New Guinea birds? Most medical school deans would've said, get the hell out of here.

1:03:45Dr. Jared Diamond

Sherm Melikoff said, Jared, UCLA Medical School is interested in New Guinea birds. I'm going to give you $5,000 every year to spend studying New Guinea birds. And so he tolerated it and he made it possible for me. I'm then fortunate that I had a dean who permitted it. As for my wife, Marie, Marie had no problems whatsoever with it. When I met Marie, I was already working in New Guinea. In fact, the development of our relationship, crucial, a crucial issue in our relationship was that Jared was going off to New Guinea for every 3 months.

1:04:24Dr. Jared Diamond

And Marie knew what happened in New Guinea. I got nearly killed in New Guinea repeatedly. And so Marie had to be willing to tolerate that. By the time that our kids were born, I had a very secure position in medical school. I was going to New Guinea. When our kids were born, it was not that Marie told me, Jared, don't go there for 3 months. It was that I realized, Jared, you're not going to go there for 3 months anymore.

1:04:47Dr. Jared Diamond

And so the kids were born, I reduced my time in New Guinea to one month at a time. And my last New Guinea trip was 2019.

1:04:55Andrew Huberman

Yeah, it raises a very interesting feature of adventurous living, much less researching and living immersed in a different culture, a different ecosystem, which is that it can be hard on the body to go places that you're not familiar with, eating food you're not familiar with. Most people would think, oh, what are you talking about? You can get a cheeseburger from McDonald's anywhere in the world now, and perhaps that's true.

1:05:23Andrew Huberman

But have you always been willing to put your physical comfort on the line in order to learn? I mean, learning languages is hard. Putting yourself into a jungle environment where there's all sorts of diseases, where there's political and social unrest, like there are a lot of variables when you get out there. there. And so then you become an intellectual explorer, but truly in the wild. Was that something that was fun, a necessary evil?

1:05:54Andrew Huberman

Where's that landed with you?

1:05:55Dr. Jared Diamond

To work in New Guinea, it's a necessary evil. It's not until I went to New Guinea, I, when I was in Peru, the year before I went to New Guinea, my friend and I went to Peru, spent a summer in Peru, We did mountain climbing. We did a first ascent of a 17,000-foot peak. Being at high altitudes, going straight up from sea level to 10,000 feet, and then 3 days later going to 16,000 is miserable. So yes, I experienced physical misery in Peru.

1:06:32Dr. Jared Diamond

In New Guinea, to do anything in New Guinea, there's lots of physical misery. The food is— sweet potatoes and rice, 3 meals a day. Being in the jungle, I'm getting bitten by scrub mites. My first year in New Guinea, I ended up with dysentery, which the doctors at Harvard couldn't cure. It remained with me for a year. My third year in New Guinea, I ended up with malaria. Climbing mountains in New Guinea. Being in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the time.

1:07:09Dr. Jared Diamond

Occasionally, Like maybe once in 3 months I can sit down at campsite and look out and at another and say, my God, that's beautiful. But the rest of the time I'm physically miserable and I'm having to deal with New Guineans who have their own ideas about what to do in life. Being in New Guinea is uncomfortable, but it's fascinating. The fascination of the birds, of figuring What's the difference between the Mabasane and the Pasquikiabi?

1:07:43Andrew Huberman

Let's talk about birds. The only other two birders I know from science are Jim Watson, started off as a birder ornithologist of some sort anyway, decided to solve this co-solve the structure of DNA, so he went a different way. And then the late, also late Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark as a, I think, a 2 Nobel winner, maybe one. Anyway, smart guy, um, who was obsessed with birds and bird taxonomy and bird watching.

1:08:19Andrew Huberman

It's interesting that all 3 of you have, it seems, a kind of obsession with going after these big questions, like entire societies, leadership, um, the structure of DNA, You know, you know, uh, elementary particles and, and, and, and all the rest. But birds, of which I know some, certainly not as much as you, there's this tremendous, tremendous diversity. And, um, unless one is really into birding, it's easy from the outside to say, like, yeah, okay, so you've got the black-capped chickadee and you've got this one and you've got that one.

1:08:58Andrew Huberman

And what information, what enrichment is to be gleaned from observing them? I'm not being disparaging of it. I myself love birds. In fact, I had the weird and unique opportunity to talk birds with Murray many years ago at a physics meeting. But my knowledge of birds is like very, very superficial compared to yours, obviously. So what is it about knowing all these nomenclatures and details about how they move and seeing them in the wild that, what does it inform you about and what does it celebrate in you?

1:09:29Dr. Jared Diamond

What does it inform us about? Yeah. Birds inform ornithologists about everything. Birds are the easiest of all animals to observe and to understand. Birds operate by the same senses that you and I do. Birds operate by sight and by sound. We humans operate by sight and sound, whereas mammals operate especially by smell. One can't rat watch. Yes, you can watch antelopes, but you don't go around watching rats. If you want to understand rats, you have to have a good sense of smell.

1:10:10Dr. Jared Diamond

You catch them in traps. But birds you can watch. And so most of what we know about ecology and evolutionary biology and biogeography and behavior has been learned first on birds and has been learned in most detail about birds. And then that knowledge we can learn— apply to other animals. So the things that I've written about birds, lots about ecology, lots about how birds divide ecological niches, lots about evolution, how bird species evolve in New Guinea, how do you get new species in an uninterrupted mountain range, biogeography, the distribution of plants and animals around the world.

1:11:01Dr. Jared Diamond

Began especially with the distribution of birds and then mammals, mammals and other things. The animals easiest to observe are birds. So when you say, what could we learn about birds? An honest answer is we can learn everything about birds and everything in the biological world is easier to learn from birds than about other animals.

1:11:24Andrew Huberman

Perfectly acceptable answer. Um, the bird, many birds, um, sing, some speak. I don't know if you're interested in the language evolution from birds, but, um, there's a name, Peter Marler. Um, oh yeah. Yeah. He was at Davis when, when I was a graduate student. And I, I, one of the most interesting observations, in my opinion, that he made was that the same species of bird would have a different song if they were raised at the Marin Headlands versus by the naturally raised by their bird parents at the Marin Headlands versus elsewhere.

1:11:58Andrew Huberman

And that there was some innate relationship to the species, like you could swap the young and they could learn the other location song, but that they would always learn their location song best. And I feel like if ever there was a set of scientific findings that kind of converges a number of your interests in language and location and migration, It's those Peter Marler studies. If you met, what did you guys talk about?

1:12:22Andrew Huberman

And what do you think is perhaps interesting about birdsong and bird language that can tell us about us?

1:12:28Dr. Jared Diamond

Everything. Everything. Birdsong. It's a communication. What are birds trying to communicate? So birds are singing. Why are they singing? What information are they conveying in the birdsong? It's been assumed that that birdsongs of males are territorial to stake out territories. But in recent years, we've learned that there's really detailed information in bird calls. For example, birds that gather in flocks like chickadees and titmice, if they see a hawk, there's a call note, just a small psst, psst, psst, psst.

1:13:11Dr. Jared Diamond

a simple call note. When the birds see the hawk, they'll give that call note and birds then 200 feet away will hear that call note and they'll know that the hawk is there before the hawk can fly those 200 feet. So there's a lot of information in bird songs. That then has inspired similar studies in, especially in monkeys. There was a husband and wife couple, Saif and Cheney, who were at UCLA and moved to Pennsylvania.

1:13:44Dr. Jared Diamond

They did wonderful studies on vervet monkeys. Vervet monkeys make grunts. And Seifarth and Cheney thought some of these grunts sound a little different. And so they started recording the grunts and playing the grunts. And they noticed some grunts, the monkeys looked up, and some grunts, the monkeys looked down, and some grunts, the monkeys prop themselves up. And they realize that the different grunts function as words.

1:14:14Dr. Jared Diamond

There's a grunt that means eagle. And when a vervet monkey comes up with a grunt for eagle, the monkeys look up. And there's another grunt that means python. When vervets hear python, they look down in the grass There's another grunt that means leopard. When they hear a leopard, they scramble up a tree. So this is an example of the information conveyed by sounds, first in birds and then in monkeys.

1:14:50Andrew Huberman

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1:16:45Andrew Huberman

In fairness to your earlier earlier example where somebody forgave you for a mistake in the laboratory and you passed on, or you said you were already rather forgiving, propagated that forward. When one of your graduate students or postdocs would walk in and say, listen, I realize we work on X, but I want to go work on this other thing, were you tolerant, amused? Because the survival of a laboratory and a research program also depends on people hopping on board the main thrust of questions.

1:17:16Andrew Huberman

I'm just curious. I'm not holding your feet to the fire. I'm just wondering how much adventurousness you tolerated in your scientific offspring.

1:17:25Dr. Jared Diamond

My postdocs and graduate students, when they were working with me, I negotiated with them to make sure that they would do a project that interested me and interested them. It had to be a project that interested me because I worked hard to find the funds and I could take only 2 or 3 students at a time. A student would be with me for 3 or 4 years. Big investment on my part. I would make that investment only if it made sense for me.

1:17:58Dr. Jared Diamond

On only one occasion did a student tell me that he wanted to have his own project. There was a wonderful I had a wonderful Argentinian student who one day came to me and said he had asked around in the physiology department and he had learned, he had been told that for postdocs, it was the norm in the department, he alleged, was that the postdoc would spend half his time working on a project of his advisor and half the time working on his own project.

1:18:33Dr. Jared Diamond

project. Now that was untrue, but he had found another postdoc of whom that was true. And he was an interesting guy and I was taken aback. Okay, you can do your own. And he did a project of his own as well as the project with me. But that's the only time that I've had a student do a project that did not interest me. Otherwise, the projects have always been projects that interested both me and the student. And that's good for the student because for the student to get my full attention and to learn from me, the student can learn from me if it's something that I know about.

1:19:17Dr. Jared Diamond

The student cannot learn from me if it's something that I don't know anything about.

1:19:20Andrew Huberman

It's clear because you've told us and your career demonstrates this, that you have had and maintain a lot of interests, deep interests and deep curiosity, almost a compulsion to follow them and solve certain things about those for yourself. Before we started recording today, we were having a quick conversation about, uh, one's preference or lack of preference for certain pets, for certain, uh, things in the world. And we don't have to go into it, um, it wasn't contentious, um, but what I was so struck by, positively struck by, is how clear you were.

1:19:53Andrew Huberman

I think we had met about 20 seconds prior. About the fact that some pets, some things, some topics, um, to you are, in your life, are a diversion. Like, you're just not interested in them. And I think, um, that fits beautifully with being interested in many other things. So this is a somewhat strange question I'm about to ask, but do you think about time? Like, how much time do I have in life to do this? And did you always think that way?

1:20:26Andrew Huberman

As somebody who just turned 51, I think about this more more and more. But the beautiful thing about an academic career is you sort of know, okay, I've got 4 to 6 years for this thesis. Boom. And then there is an opportunity to pivot slightly or a lot. But life is somewhat different, right? But it's clear to me that you were saying, that's all fine and good for other people, but I don't want to be bothered, invest my life energy in those Clear, period, end of story.

1:20:57Andrew Huberman

And it's very refreshing, in fact, because I— and it runs countercurrent to this idea that you're interested in everything. You're not interested in everything, if I may. You're very interested in a lot of things, and that provides a really nice razor to separate out all the things that you're just not gonna be bothered by. Has this always been a feature of you?

1:21:15Dr. Jared Diamond

Absolutely not. And to give you a preview of coming events of what's ahead of you, when I turned 80, 80. 80 was not a shock to me. 81 was more of a shock because 81 meant that I was firmly embedded in the '80s. But even though I knew perfectly well the numbers for life expectancy, life expectancy of an American man at birth is something like 78. Life expectancy of an American man who's reached the age of 70, this is not so widely known.

1:21:47Dr. Jared Diamond

When you've reached the age of 70, your life expectancy is not 78, your life expectancy is 93 because a lot of the risk is behind you. And I knew that perfectly well. But when I was 81 years old, I wasn't counting what I could do. But in the last couple of years since I'm now 89, I'm very conscious of time left and what I want to do in the time left. A couple of specific things that I want to do in the time left are To synthesize my understanding.

1:22:23Dr. Jared Diamond

New Guinea has 10 outlined mountain ranges. I did the first ascents and the first ornithological explorations of several of them and most detailed explorations of the rest. If I don't write that up, that knowledge will die with me because those mountain ranges are difficult to get into and I want to do a synthesis looking at those 10 mountain ranges to understand what is it that makes a species a good colonist? Why some bird species are on all 10 mountain ranges and other birds are on only one mountain range.

1:22:55Dr. Jared Diamond

I've got that unique dataset and I want to write that up while I'm still alive. Another thing that I've been thinking for quite a while, I'm musical. I particularly love the music of Bach. I sang in Boston's Handel and Haydn Society. I sang in Cambridge, England's Musical Society. Benjamin Britten came and did the premiere of his Cantata Academica when I was singing in the Cambridge Chorus. So I've been interested and I've sung in the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whom I particularly love.

1:23:32Dr. Jared Diamond

He wrote 210 church cantatas. I sang in about 20 of them. And I've been telling myself, sooner or later I want to get to know all of those cantatas. A year ago August, the time has come. The time ahead of me is finite. Better start on the cantatas now. And so I started on the cantatas at a rate of about one a week. Last night I relistened to Cantata 61 and 62. Next will come Cantata 63. At the rate I'm going, it will take me maybe 3 or 4 years to to get to know all of the Bach cantatas, but that's something that I would like to do.

1:24:08Dr. Jared Diamond

But I'm very conscious now of the amount of time left, and I've had that consciousness only in the past few years.

1:24:17Andrew Huberman

Are there any things that you used to do out of feelings of obligation that you no longer do that allow you more time for the things and the people that are important to you and that you wish you would perhaps perhaps permitted yourself to do earlier?

1:24:32Dr. Jared Diamond

My first thought is no. By and large, I've done the things that I've enjoyed doing. Now, of course, there are things that are not pleasure that have to be done in life.

1:24:45Andrew Huberman

Sure.

1:24:46Dr. Jared Diamond

I spend lots of time, probably I spend at least a month, maybe 2 months of the year on our income tax returns, which are complicated. I have a pathological tolerance for manipulating numbers, so I don't object to doing income taxes much as most other people would do it. Income tax has to be done and takes a lot of my time. What else do I do? My father washed the dishes. I wash the dishes together with my wife. Marie does the gardening.

1:25:20Dr. Jared Diamond

I have no interest in gardening. Marie does the gardening. Gardening. Marie does does the shopping. I excuse myself by, and Marie Marie knows that I spend the equivalent a couple months of the year on income tax, and I take care of the insurance, and I do much of the organization of travel. I don't mind dealing with insurance. I don't mind doing doing income tax and. I'd rather spend the time doing birds, but it's not something that I greatly object to.

1:25:54Andrew Huberman

I would never ask someone to come here and speak for somebody else, but I was gratified to learn that you're, you were close friends with my colleague Paul Ehrlich, and his wife Sandra Kahn is still on the faculty at Stanford. Paul wrote, of course, The Population Bomb. Um, the book, uh, Paul and Sandra wrote the book Jaws with, I think it had a foreword by you and maybe an introduction from Bob Sapolsky about, um, mouth breathing being detrimental to facial structure development and as well as health perhaps.

1:26:32Andrew Huberman

And, uh, they called it an epidemic. Uh, there's some interest in nasal breathing and apnea and so forth. Paul was a delightful person, as you know, you knew him much better than I did. Mm-hmm. But he got some things right, and some people would argue he got certain things wrong. Like the, the population bomb, my understanding was that it would, it argued that we're, we're going to be badly overpopulated by the time we reach now, and that, that was dangerous.

1:27:00Andrew Huberman

Some people would argue that birth rates are going down, the replacement problem is more of an issue. But was he correct about some of the issues with population growth and environmental impact? This isn't an area that I've any expertise, but what do you think are some of the places where he was oh so correct? Because he was incredibly smart and in many ways prescient on some of these topics.

1:27:23Dr. Jared Diamond

He was certainly correct that the biggest threats that humans face today, of course they include the nuclear risk of exterminating ourselves. I'd say the 3 biggest risks we face The nuclear risk, the consequences of inequality in our globalized world. Now anybody anywhere is affected by anybody anywhere else, and that's an invitation to the World Trade Towers attack. In a globalized world, it's dangerous to have inequality.

1:27:56Dr. Jared Diamond

And then the third risk is of course the risk of running out of resources, destroying our resources, which we are doing at a rapid rate. Why are we in the process of overexploiting our resources? Because the world population has increased. There are now what, 9 billion people? 10,000 years ago there were probably 1 million people, 1 million people on Earth, and now we got 9 billion. But what counts is not just the number of people, but the consumption rate per person.

1:28:30Dr. Jared Diamond

Consumption rate per person in the first world has gone up, and the result is that we are depleting fisheries, but like 4 billion of the world's people depend upon fish, seafood for their protein. We are depleting the world's forests. We are depleting the world's topsoil. Paul and his wife Anne, the book The Population Bomb called attention to the danger of population growth. And one can now add to population growth multiplied by consumption per person.

1:29:07Dr. Jared Diamond

Paul predicted big dangers within the next few decades. He predicted widespread starvation. If you look at his Wikipedia entry, so here's one of the world's great modern scientists and is the goddamn Wikipedia His Wikipedia entry instead harps on his book, The Population Bomb, and says it didn't prove correct. Well, out of the 9 billion people in the world today, how many of them are underfed and starving? Are they starving to death?

1:29:47Dr. Jared Diamond

No, they're not starving to death quickly, but they've got short lifespans and they're having miserable lifespans because A small fraction of the world's people have first world lifestyles. Even in the United States, the polarization in the United States between the people who have enough and the people who don't have enough is growing. So to blame Paul Ehrlich for getting it wrong, no, he got it right, but he got it right in a a broader sense than the idiots who attack him are willing to admit.

1:30:25Andrew Huberman

Happy to hear you say this. Long been a fan of his work and him, and I agree. And Jaws is a wonderful book, and I think The Population Bomb still has great— there's real value in reading it, even if the specific statements, as you pointed out, held up differently. It's still a really important work. We talked We talked about political leaders. We talked about religious leaders and a bit about cults. Sports. Are you into sports?

1:30:55Dr. Jared Diamond

Am I into sports? Well, I work out.

1:31:00Andrew Huberman

Yeah, you look very healthy. Is that an important part of your intellectual rigor as well?

1:31:04Dr. Jared Diamond

I've always been physically active. I began weightlifting in college. I ran for For years. The day that my wife was in labor and was about to deliver our twins, I was going running and I was so excited that she was about to deliver twins that instead of putting my lunch in the refrigerator and my shoes on the floor, I put my running shoes in the refrigerator and my lunch on the floor. So I still work out several days a week. Being physically active It's a big part of my life. I get satisfaction out of it.

1:31:44Andrew Huberman

And I think for somebody to do physical exercise nowadays with the intention of building and preserving both their mind and body is pretty common. But when you were in college, if I extrapolate, that wasn't really talked about. In fact, the separation of intellectual and athletic endeavors was kind of a theme. It was like people played sports, right? But working out was sort of the stuff of like military jocks and bodybuilders and running less so, right?

1:32:17Andrew Huberman

But I find that all the scientists that I know that have had very long successful careers and are still going strong, all are very physically active and have been for a long time. All of them. And the ones who aren't are mostly dead, if I'm honest.

1:32:35Dr. Jared Diamond

The great Harvard organic chemist Woodward, R.B. Woodward, who won 2 Nobel Prizes. Woodward did not do any physical exercise whatsoever. He didn't want to spend any time doing anything except organic chemistry. And of course, he died at an early age.

1:32:51Andrew Huberman

In the lab, presumably.

1:32:53Dr. Jared Diamond

I think in bed.

1:32:54Andrew Huberman

Okay. Well, better than in one's office or lab. So along those lines, athletics and sports, which sport are you into? Spectator sports? And what led you to explore leaders in sport?

1:33:14Dr. Jared Diamond

I explored leaders in sports for the same reason that business school professors do a lot of their re— much of their research on on sports outcomes. In fact, I would say that much or maybe even most of the research on sports outcomes is done by business school professors. The reason being that business school professors are of course interested in business outcomes, but business outcomes, they're hard to measure. CEOs tend to be secretive.

1:33:52Dr. Jared Diamond

Businesses may not publish their results or they do publish them every 5 years so that the data for the business world is limited. But in sports, games are played every week or a couple of times a week. The results of the games are announced. The coach is there on the sidelines, usually jumping up and down screaming. The players are well known. Sports is on The result is that the methods that business school professors have developed for analyzing CEOs and for analyzing the business world are often developed in sports and they're debugged in sports.

1:34:35Dr. Jared Diamond

For example, in the business world, one of the main questions is, of course, how much of business success is due to the CEO? This is a loudly discussed— CEOs say, I'm responsible for the success, therefore you ought to pay me billions of dollars because my company, our company makes $100 billion. But because I'm responsible for that $100 billion profit, you can pay me $10 billion. Is that true? It's complicated to figure out.

1:35:10Dr. Jared Diamond

There are a couple of methods. One involves doing what's called ANOVA, analysis of variance, analysis of variance applied to sports shows that roughly 15 to 30% of the variance in sports success is due to the coach. About another 30% is due to players, and about another 30% is due to the institutions. That's in sports. In the business world, it turns out that similarly CEOs account for about 30% of Anova and the individual company accounts for another— Procter& Gamble, very well-run company, been well-run for 150 years.

1:35:56Dr. Jared Diamond

Another 30% is due to the industry. Perfume companies and computer companies and teenage t-shirt companies tend to be very profitable, whereas departments of water and power tend to be unprofitable. Why? regulated by governments. So ANOVA gets applied to the sports world and also to the business world. But in addition, coaches frequently get fired if they have a losing season and CEOs get fired if the company has a poor year, low returns.

1:36:38Dr. Jared Diamond

So if you fire a CEO because of a losing season, The next year, usually the new CEO has a better season. Why? Because 70% of the variance in sports outcomes is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO. If you're throwing dice and you throw dice and you get a 1, and so you say to the person who threw the dice, you are a lousy dice thrower. You got 1. I'm firing you, for statistical reasons, the chances are 5 out of 6 that the next dice thrower will do better than one because there's 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

1:37:20Dr. Jared Diamond

In the sports world, when you fire a coach, usually the new coach has a better record. Why? Because of all the random factors. My university, UCLA, our athletic department is now $150 million in debt. Why? Because we fired all of our basketball coaches since John Wooden. And when we fire them, we have to buy out their contract. So buy out their contract, $5 million, $10 million, $15 million. Similarly, when you fire the CEO, the next CEO is likely to do better for random reasons as with dice throwing.

1:38:00Dr. Jared Diamond

That illustrates why business school professors have gotten lots of their insights by analyzing

1:38:08Andrew Huberman

How important is a coach's philosophy and by extension a CEO's philosophy on like why we are doing this? We hear so much about this, like that the why behind things is so important, but is that actually the case?

1:38:24Dr. Jared Diamond

Yes, but rarely. So John Wooden is usually regarded as the greatest coach in the history of American sports and in any sport. Under John Wooden, The UCLA basketball team won, what, 9 national championships, including 7 in a row. No other college has won more than 2 national championships in a row. Why was John Wooden so successful? There were many reasons that he was successful. He got his players in peak physical condition.

1:38:53Dr. Jared Diamond

Although his players might be 5 inches shorter than Duke's players, he got his players to jump higher than the Duke players. He was a master of detail. He cared about what socks that they wore because the socks that they wore affected how they jumped and how they played. He paid a lot of attention to getting his players to train not just in groups of 5, which they'll be on the court, but in groups of 7 so that he could substitute.

1:39:22Dr. Jared Diamond

But perhaps the most important thing about John Wooden was that for him, basketball was not a sport. Basketball was a philosophy of life. And John Wooden Wooden's great players, Bill Walton and Hal Sandor, they said, Coach Wooden, I learned more from Coach Wooden than from any human other than my parents. But what I learned from him was about life, not about playing basketball. That basketball, basketball is a model for life.

1:39:51Dr. Jared Diamond

That's unusual among coaches. Bill Belichick, I've never heard anyone say that Bill Belichick is a model for life. And what Bobby Knight— nobody says that Bobby Knight was a model for philosophy of life. So why is it that John Wooden was so successful? Partly he was a master of detail, but also because he regarded basketball as a form of living life. And that's something that you can't fake. Yeah. You can fake and you can learn how to how to train your players to jump higher, but you can't fake a philosophy of life as John Wooden did.

1:40:33Andrew Huberman

Is there an analog inside of the— well, nowadays it seems it's tech CEOs and entrepreneurs. I mean, we have these looming larger-than-life figures that having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know, it was Hewlett and Packard when I was a kid and then Steve Jobs, obviously. and Bill Gates up in Seattle. And then now we have Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman. Dario at Anthropic is sort of quickly emerging as another one of these big figures, but I probably missed a few out there.

1:41:06Andrew Huberman

But those are sort of the big, whether they like it or not, celebrity technologists that people look at and to for like, where, where, where is humanity going? Politics aside, Steve Jobs, Jobs clearly had a philosophy of creating beautiful things and design and technology being fused in a way that was highly accessible, that objects had a friendliness to them or something, even if it was an apple. So it seemed there was something philosophical, even slightly mystical there.

1:41:36Andrew Huberman

How do you look at these technology leaders and what do you see? What do you think?

1:41:43Dr. Jared Diamond

Bill Gates, I've met him and I have had several lengthy conversations and I like him. Good experience, my conversation with him. There are people who've met him under other circumstances who have different views of him. Elon Musk, I met once. Jeff Bezos.

1:41:59Andrew Huberman

Oh yeah. So forgive me, I should have mentioned Bezos. Yeah.

1:42:02Dr. Jared Diamond

Jeff Bezos. Bezos, I met once. Of the leaders in the business world, I don't know that many of them. The one that I admire as a person is Chouinard of Patagonia. For him, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life. He emphasized having his staff have time off. He emphasized Patagonia being sustainable. He had the opportunity to acquire more cotton, produce more product. No, he chose not to acquire more cotton because he didn't want to— He didn't want to— to overdevelop cotton agriculture.

1:42:44Dr. Jared Diamond

He is or was a full person, not just a leading business person. He did the first ascent of the most difficult face in Yosemite. He was a top-rank mountaineer. I know him. I wrote the preface for his autobiography. He has a philosophy of life. Do any other of the big names? Does Jeff Bezos have a philosophy of life? Does Mark Zuckerberg have a philosophy of life? I'm not aware of these big names having a philosophy of life that goes beyond their business.

1:43:26Dr. Jared Diamond

Now, Steve Jobs certainly had a philosophy of life as regards business. When he came back to Apple after he'd been fired the first time and Apple was in difficulty, he was brought back the second time. His philosophy industry was that Apple, he reduced, instead of Apple producing 100 products, he said we should produce 4 products and the products should look nice and they should be attractive and they should be easy to handle.

1:43:58Dr. Jared Diamond

They should not be like the remote for my wife's and my TV to watch the World Soccer Cup. Our remote has what, 47 buttons? And we had to call up our Each time to tell us how to operate the remote. So Steve Jobs' devices don't have 47, but he had a philosophy certainly of products. I don't know whether he had a larger philosophy of life as John Wooden certainly did.

1:44:30Andrew Huberman

So we talked about political leaders, religious leaders, you said there's a 4th category that you cover in your book.

1:44:39Dr. Jared Diamond

So we got political leaders, business leaders, sports leaders, and religious. Those are the 4 categories.

1:44:47Andrew Huberman

And business and sport seem to kind of interdigitate a bit, right? It sounds like.

1:44:54Dr. Jared Diamond

The connection between business studies and sports studies has been especially tight, but it's also the case that the business school professors who've studied sports have also studied success in politics. So perhaps the best single paper that I know on developing new methods for studying the success of leaders looks at leaders in politics, looks at leaders in business and leaders in— but it also looks at leaders in politics.

1:45:34Dr. Jared Diamond

And the conclusions that it comes to are that prime ministers make more of a difference than do governors of states, and governors make more of a difference than do mayors. Why? Because prime ministers have more power. Also, dictators make more of a difference than do democratic leaders. Democratic leaders in wartime make more of a difference than do democratic leaders in peacetime because in wartime democratic leaders are given more power.

1:46:07Dr. Jared Diamond

So the business school professors have also applied their methods to politics as well.

1:46:15Andrew Huberman

Many people are interested in many things and they have a genuine excitement and they reverberate on the idea of pursuing music or singing or an instrument or a topic of study or a sport. What would you tell those people? Because we've all heard the just do it mantra, and that's great. But again, I'm not a psychologist, but it seems that within you there is, or perhaps has always been, this almost compulsion to go in a certain direction.

1:46:49Andrew Huberman

But you're structured in how you go about that. You didn't just try to do everything at once, and you clearly succeeded in each of these domains. I'm sure there were challenges along the way, but what would What would you, if anything, would you like to pass along to people of any age?

1:47:05Dr. Jared Diamond

I would begin by saying, do what you enjoy, but it's got to be broader than that. A friend of mine, the great biologist Tom Lovejoy, now unfortunately dead. Tom told me when he was a teenager, Tom asked his father, Daddy, what should I do for a career? And his father said, do something that you're good at. Do something that you enjoy. Do something That makes a difference in the world. What advice would I give people?

1:47:33Dr. Jared Diamond

Perhaps the main advice, because it's what most people do not do, is make sure that you do something that you enjoy. And if people tell you, no, you gotta do this, this, this, tell 'em to go to hell. Literally. So many people say, you got to, you got to live your life. life this way. You gotta iron your shirts. When I was a grad, I didn't iron my shirts. Now someone who irons my shirts, but as far as I'm concerned, if anyone tells me, Jared, spend your time ironing your shirts, go to hell.

1:48:10Dr. Jared Diamond

There are other things that I wanna do with my time. And whether my— this shirt is ironed, but whether my shirts are ironed or not doesn't make much difference to life. What does make a difference is am I doing something that I enjoy? Am I doing something that I'm good at? Yep. Am I doing something that's good for the world? Yeah. I've spent a lot of time designing the national park system for Indonesia and New Guinea, designing the principles for national parks in general.

1:48:37Dr. Jared Diamond

I've written books about the big risks facing the world. So I've devoted a lot of my life to trying to convince people to live better lives and not to mess up the world. I've done things that I enjoy. I've done things that I'm good at. There are some things that I wanted to do, but I discovered that I was not— I would've loved to be a conductor of orchestras, but to conduct an orchestra, you see the players out there and you got to give the downbeat, not when the players are playing, but because of the speed of sound, you got to give the downbeat ahead.

1:49:10Dr. Jared Diamond

I could not block out the sound of the plane. I could not not do the downbeat before the players play. And I tried conducting an orchestra. UCLA invited me to conduct their orchestra, and I conducted the orchestra once. And because I cannot anticipate the downbeat, I gave up my desire to conduct an orchestra, although I would've loved doing that. But I've ended up doing the things that I'm good at, doing things that I love doing, doing things that are important, that were good

1:49:43Andrew Huberman

I agree on all, all fronts. Not that you need my agreement. I said there were 2 questions. You answered the second question in the process of answering the first question. So I just want to conclude by saying thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come share with us and educate us. I'm super excited about Prophets, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? Today's conversation only makes me more excited about it.

1:50:10Andrew Huberman

I will say that that your, your father, despite his encouragement to, uh, you to continue and become a biologist and not a translator, with all due respect, he partially failed because for me and for millions of other people, you've become a translator of ideas that we would have never encountered or considered. And it's inspired a ton of curiosity and learning in me through your books. And, um, today's just another extension of that.

1:50:36Andrew Huberman

And I'm sure that this next book will just continue that. So. Thank you. Thank you for not obeying his request and at the same time obeying his request. I really appreciate your time and coming here today, and hopefully we'll do it again.

1:50:48Dr. Jared Diamond

Thank you. I've enjoyed a lot talking with you. You know, for— you know yourself, for writing a book, one does interviews and podcasts, and interviewers differ. They're not all the same. Some interviewers are better prepared than other interviewers. Some interviewers know more about the subject than other interviewers. It's a real pleasure to do a conversation with you. You're— it's a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you.

1:51:19Andrew Huberman

Thank you. The pleasure was mine, and we'll do it again. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond. To learn more about his work and his recent book, Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, please see the links in the show note If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple.

1:51:44Andrew Huberman

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1:52:06Andrew Huberman

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1:52:30Andrew Huberman

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