367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

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Sean Carroll (1:07)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. History, to me, has always been one of the most intimidating academic subjects, just because it's at the opposite end of physics in the simplification scale. If you think about how many things happened in any one historical period, literally the number of events that you could potentially write down and record. Well, it's infinite or it's essentially infinite. If you think about every single person doing everything that they're doing, history has to be a story of picking and choosing, certain things being important and certain things being unimportant. It's more than just picking ones that are popular or whatever. When we say what's important, what's unimportant, we're trying to be explanatory. We're trying to tell a story that makes sense of history. Why did this happen? What might we learn from this particular thing happening at that particular point in time?

Once you start doing that, once you start asking why did this happen, why did that happen? There's one obvious question that comes up over and over again, not yet completely settled, of course, which is the relative importance of individuals, the great man theory of history, or at least the idea that one plucky, charismatic, right place, right time individual person can make choices that have a huge impact on the historical trajectory that goes from there, versus the idea that actually they don't. Maybe we tell stories of presidents and kings and generals and scientists and whatever, but really even without those individuals, things would have happened almost exactly the same. It's very hard to tell because we only have one historical record, right? We can't actually run the parallel universes and see what's going on. So one of the voices that you might sometimes hear in this debate about grand historical deterministic forces versus plucky individuals is today's guest, Jared Diamond, who is a professor at UCLA who I'm not sure I'm going to get this right. He started as a professor of physiology and then moved into geography.

We talked a little bit in the podcast about what it means to be a big picture interdisciplinary scientist.

And of course, he had a very famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, back in like 1997, I think it was, where a very famous big, big hit. You know, a lot of people read it. I read it, won the Pulitzer Prize. And it put forward the idea that, you know, you can't argue that certain areas of the world, certain continents and countries and things like that, have kind of dominated a little bit in the last few centuries, have, you know, taken over other areas. And why is that? Is it because the people are just especially clever or have more initiative or whatever?

And Diamond argued that, no, it had nothing to do, almost nothing to do, with the differences between the people in one area or another. It had more to do with geography and the environment, the ability to do agriculture on large scales, the ability to have enough land, enough natural resources, different kinds of plants, then also different kinds of metal and the guns in the title, and of course, germs, the ability to maintain immunity or resistance to certain diseases that other people elsewhere didn't have. So it was sort of a story where individuals didn't make much of a difference in that big picture sweep. So he's written many books since then, but the new book is called, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, When Do Leaders Matter? And there's some, I need to explain the title because you can't look at it. You can only hear me saying it. The two first words, profits and profits, are spelled P-R-O-F-I-T-S, as in money, P-R-O-P-H-E-T-S, as in religious leaders, and also the When Do Leaders Matter? subtitle, the word when is in parentheses. So it's also asking simultaneously, do leaders matter at all? So, you know, don't take the title incorrectly. It's not like a self-help book to be a good leader. It's asking the historical question, when do presidents and generals, but also CEOs and religious leaders, and for that matter, sports leaders, like coaches, when do they matter? How much do they matter? How much is luck? How much is design? And all that. So you'll be unsurprised to hear, the answer is, it's complicated. Sometimes the answer is complicated. The leaders do matter, Diamond argues, but they don't always matter completely. And whether or not they're going to matter is going to depend a lot on the situation they're in. But that's okay. We love the complications here at the Mindscape Podcast. We're going to dig in and figure out what those complications are, figure out when these people matter and when they don't. So let's go.