Jared Diamond Returns (on the science of leadership)

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Jared Diamond joins Dax Shepard to discuss his research into the science of leadership and whether historical figures are truly irreplaceabl

Key takeaways

• The 'Hamlet test' determines if a leader was truly unique or if someone else could have achieved the same result.
• Bill Gates leveraged the perfect timing of the 1976 Popular Electronics cover to launch his computing vision.

Main topics

• The Science of Leadership
• The Hamlet Test

Notable quotes

The book is not about which is true. It's instead a typical Jared Diamond response. It depends.

Conclusion

The episode offers a profound, data-driven look at the intersection of

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi. Today we have, which is a great honor, for the second time, but this time in the flesh, Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond is a scientist, historian, a professor, and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. I mean, this guy started in the physiology department, then he became the head of the geography department. Talk about a polymer. He's an ornithologist. Speaker 3 (0:27) I mean, he's one of the smartest people we've talked to. Speaker 2 (0:29) Yeah, he really is. His most famous book, of course, legendary, Guns, Germs, and Steel. If you have not read that book, it is phenomenal. Everyone should read that book. Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, The World Until Yesterday, Upheaval, and his new book out now called Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, When Do Leaders Matter? Speaker 3 (0:51) This was so interesting. Speaker 2 (0:52) It's so fascinating. Spoiler, there's not one thing that we can predict an Speaker 3 (0:58) effective leader on. There's Speaker 2 (0:59) many, many things that contribute to whether or not they are. Please enjoy Jared Diamond. Speaker 2 (1:25) Oh my goodness, you're already here. Yes, Speaker 1 (1:26) I am. How are you, sir? I'm good. How are you? Good. Wonderful to see you in real life. Hi. Hi. How are you? Last time we were Zoomed, Speaker 2 (1:34) right? Yeah, Speaker 3 (1:34) we Speaker 2 (1:34) were. I think we were Zoomed. Speaker 1 (1:36) I Speaker 3 (1:36) think. Speaker 1 (1:37) If you recall. Yes, I do. My sons reminded me. That's their Speaker 2 (1:43) role in your life? I have two daughters that I'm hoping will take over much of my cognition as I get older. How old are Speaker 1 (1:52) your daughters? Speaker 2 (1:53) 11 and 13. Speaker 1 (1:54) You are in the eye of the storm. Thank you for saying that. I Speaker 2 (1:58) feel a little alone in the eye of the storm Speaker 1 (2:01) currently. We got through it okay. We have twins. They're 39 years old. Oh, wow. Nothing terrible went wrong. In their teens, they wanted more to spend time with their friends and not just alone with their boring parents. Yeah. Eventually. When they were committed to bringing along their friends, they tolerated their boring parents. Speaker 2 (2:22) Yeah. Right. Jared, I'm so happy to have you in person as an anthro major at your school. Of course, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's in the selfish gene Bible-like canon of things we worship. And so it was a great honor to interview you the first time. But we were over Zoom, and now we get to sit together. Speaker 1 (2:40) Yeah. As Speaker 2 (2:41) if I got to take one of your classes in real life. So your first huge book was, as I just said, Guns, Germs and Steel. It really addressed this question of why were Europeans so successful at taking over the rest of the planet? Were they the product of great special men or were they simply the recipients of great geography, which is what the conclusion of the book was, right? Speaker 1 (3:05) Right. In effect, why are you and I now talking? English on the land of Native Americans instead of in London they're talking Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Empire. Why'd it turn out that way? Speaker 2 (3:18) Right. But this book now is interestingly kind of coming at a similar question, which is leaders. What makes a great leader? How relevant are leaders? Are they, as Tolstoy said, are they the passengers of history? Are they like Carlyle said, history has been shaped by great men, which is true? And if so, when and why is it true and when and why is it not true? Is that a succinct premise of the book? Speaker 1 (3:48) Exactly. The book is not about which is true. It's instead a typical Jared Diamond response. It depends. And so I look at factors. There are about six factors that enable one to explain why leaders do or don't make a difference. Speaker 2 (4:04) We'll get to go through a lot of specific leaders in four different domains, politics, history, sports, religion, and business. These are the four silos we're going to evaluate leadership, right? But I think first we should know what are the factors that we think contribute to a great leader. Speaker 1 (4:23) First of all, timing, being at the right time and place. Some leaders can control their time and place. Bill Gates, when he saw the... cover issue of Popular Electronics in what was it, January 1976. He had been talking with Paul Allen about developing a personal computer, but kept telling Paul the time isn't right. And when he saw that cover, he said, now is the right time. We got to act fast. So some leaders choose their time and place. Some leaders can't choose their time and place, but they recognize they're at the right time and place. So I see the finest hour of Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill in the concluding paragraph of Gathering Storm, the first of those six volumes, Churchill said when he had been appointed prime minister, I knew that this was the moment towards which my life had been pointing. He didn't make that. It was the week of Dunkirk. Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France, but Germany's invasion of France. did result in Chamberlain's resigning and Churchill becoming prime minister. So he knew it was the right time, but he didn't make it. And then finally, Mark Zuckerberg was at the right time and place, but he didn't know it. He was born in 1984 for reasons beyond his control. The result was that he was a sophomore at Harvard in 2004, which, because of changes in the Internet, there had been social media before, and that was the perfect time to have found big... social media. Speaker 2 (5:49) And he was at the perfect location. Harvard had this cachet. People wanted the Harvard EDU. You know, there's a lot of layers on it. Speaker 1 (5:56) You're exactly right. So time and place is one factor. Another factor is what in the book I call discretion, which does not mean behaving discreetly, but means having the power to make decisions. For example, mayors have much less power to make decisions than do governors. Governors have less power than do presidents. Democratic presidents have less power than do dictators. Democratic presidents in wartime have more power than in peacetime. Or in the business world, it's interesting, CEOs of public utilities don't have much power because public utilities are tightly regulated. The CEOs with the greatest power are CEOs of perfume companies and teenage t-shirt companies. A friend of mine is the... CEO of a teenage t-shirt company. He's a billionaire because when he recognizes what will be the trend two weeks from now, he has the complete power to churn out those t-shirts. So he's a billionaire. You Speaker 2 (6:54) point out that if you're the CEO of some power or water system, the innovations happened. You're pretty much overseeing a system that has probably made most of the changes it's ever going to make. There's not going to be a lot of crucial pivots. that have to be made. So yeah, the more cutting edge the technology, the more flexible the company has to be, then those CEOs are much more relevant. Speaker 1 (7:19) Right. Even in sports, on the average, a coach of a college team has more discretion than the coach of a professional team because with a professional team, the players are there for longer, they have more power, and the professional team has an owner and a general manager. So on the average, College coaches have more discretion. That's a third factor. So timing Speaker 2 (7:40) in place, discretion. How much power do you actually have? Speaker 1 (7:43) A fourth consideration is whether or not you are the founder. The founder of a country like George Washington or Lee Kuan Yew. The founder of a country sets the institutions for good or bad that are likely to continue for quite a while. So founders, and similarly founders in the business world, have more discretion. That's a fourth factor. Fifth factor is... that a leader who sees that the public should be doing something that the public doesn't want to do, but convinces, gets the public to do it. Franklin Roosevelt recognized that the United States had to prepare for war, but the American public did not want to prepare for war. But because he saw it, and he gradually nudged the government in that direction, he had more influence. than a leader who was doing what the public wanted. The Speaker 2 (8:33) thing I find most impressive in the list is the leader who can convince people to do things they don't want to do. That to me seems like a very esteemable triumph. If you can convince people to do things they don't want. Well, it's Speaker 3 (8:46) a good thing that they're trying to get them to do. True, true, true. In Speaker 2 (8:49) the FDR sense. Speaker 1 (8:51) And, you know, another example, Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle, the last thing the French wanted to do in 1958 was to pull out of Algeria. But de Gaulle recognized that they had to pull out of Algeria. And he got to do it in a tricky way. He began by saying, we will not pull out of Algeria until after... there have been no terrorist acts for nine months. And then he said, we're not going to get out of Algiers until there have been no terrorist acts for five months. So eventually, he said, and now we're getting out of Algiers. So he got the French to do what they didn't want to do. Then finally, the last thing on my list of six is that a leader who does not have outstanding colleagues, Clement Attlee. produced the biggest change in social policy in Britain in the 20th century, but he's not nearly as famous as Winston Churchill because Clement Attlee had about five cabinet members, all of whom were skilled and talented, and they shared the glory. If Attlee hadn't done it, one of those five would have. done it. So that's the sixth reason. If you have the misfortune, each of you would have an outstanding colleague. Speaker 2 (9:57) Yes, yes, yes. We're going to have Speaker 3 (9:59) to Speaker 2 (9:59) share that glory, which we do. But we left out the most important one that comes up most often in the book, I think, which is this thing you label the Hamlet test. So explain the Hamlet test. Speaker 1 (10:12) The Hamlet test is a test that leaders rarely pass. People think, or he or she, she or he, is the only person who could do it. Well, in a country of 340 million people, the United States, it's hard to make an argument that Jeff Bezos was the only one of 340 million Americans who could found Amazon. But in the case of Botswana, a tiny colony of one million, where at the time of independence, there were only 22 college graduates. Speaker 2 (10:43) They had seven miles of paved road in the entire country. Speaker 1 (10:46) That's right. And on top of that, of those 22 college graduates, Sretse Kama was the chief of the most powerful tribe. And so he was the only chief who could get away with abolishing the power of the chiefs. And on top of that, it was on his tribe's land that were found the diamonds that made the wealth of Botswana. So he was the only chief who could get away with giving away. the tribe's diamonds and saying that they were national treasures. He Speaker 2 (11:13) was both the president and the chief of this very important tribe. So, yes, he had to have so many things. Speaker 3 (11:20) That's similar to the competition one, I feel, or sharing the glory. It's like, if it's only you. Speaker 2 (11:24) And you're the only person. So the reason you call it the Hamlet test, and I don't know that people would necessarily know this history, but explain why Hamlet is relevant. Speaker 1 (11:33) Sure, people will necessarily not know the history. Hamlet is often regarded as the greatest play in the English literature. So Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Was Shakespeare the only person who could write Hamlet? Well, in this case, I call it the Hamlet set because this is one of those rare cases where there aren't another 340 million people to consider to write. First of all, you had to have a track record of writing other plays first. Hamlet was Shakespeare's 22nd play, and he'd already written good plays like Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. But also, to write Hamlet, you had to have a London theatre company, and Shakespeare had the best theatre company, the best theatre in London. So there were only about two dozen outstanding... Elizabethan dramatists. We know every one of them, and we've got their plays, so we can read their plays and decide whether their plays were as good as Hamlet. None of them wrote plays that were as good as Hamlet, so that's why I call it the Hamlet test. We know all of the other candidates, whereas in the case of Jeff Bezos, we can't name all 340 million Americans who might have done what he did. Right. Speaker 2 (12:37) Okay. So let's start where the book kind of starts. And this is, again, probably not a very well-known story about Hitler, but in 1930, years before he becomes chancellor. He is being driven in a car in the passenger seat by a chauffeur and a large truck that is speeding towards them. The impact seems inevitable. The chauffeur floors it. They narrowly avoid what would have probably been the death of Adolf Hitler years before he was chancellor. So then this brings this tasty question. Would Germany have had this trajectory without Adolf Hitler? How do we work through this counterfactual fantasy? Speaker 1 (13:13) So I was born in 1937, which means that I grew up in the world of Hitler. And on top of that, my family's from Europe on both sides. My wife is from Poland, the last of my family in Europe, and half of my wife's family in Poland. disappeared in the Holocaust. In the case of my wife's family, we know that one of them died. My wife's father's father was killed on the train to Auschwitz. My wife's mother survived Auschwitz with legacies. So in the case of Hitler, historians debate, would... World War II and the Holocaust have happened if there had not been Hitler. They write biographies. The trouble with writing biographies is all biographers have to recount the same facts. And most biographers conclude he made a difference. But then A.J.P. Taylor, perhaps the best-known British historian of the post-war period, concluded, using the same facts, Hitler was a normal German politician who did what any German politician would have done, and so Hitler did not make a difference. Biographers would argue that Hitler did make a difference because he was way out of line in his anti-Semitism. There were plenty of German anti-Semites, but none proposed industrial-scale extermination. He was the most charismatic speaker for good or for evil. He was infinitely above even Winston Churchill in his charisma. He also was amazingly skilled as a deceiver of people. He's famous for having deceived Neville Chamberlain at Munich. But on top of it, he deceived German industrialists, and he deceived German generals, and he deceived his fellow Nazis. He was a great deceiver. So those are the reasons why most biographers believe that Hitler made a difference, but A.J.P. Taylor didn't. So how can one settle it? The method that can bring conclusions. is the method that I call natural experiments. So I trained in medical physiology. I worked in the laboratory. Chemists, molecular biologists, they work in the laboratory and they discover things by means of controlled, manipulative experiments. Meaning you got... two batches of test tubes, and one you pour a dye in and the other you don't pour, you've set up the experiment yourself. If we social scientists were permitted to do such experiments, I would run around since World War II killing 47 prime ministers and not killing 200 prime ministers, and then I would do the statistics, and quickly I would know whether prime ministers made a difference. Well, that's not nice, and it's illegal, and it's immoral, but history has done that experiment for me. Namely, since World War II, there have been 47 prime ministers who died natural deaths of cancer and heart disease, and Harold Holt drowned, and then there were about 200 prime ministers who didn't die natural deaths. But we can compare the outcomes, and the numbers are so high that we can do statistics on it, or in the business world, if I wanted to see whether CEOs make a difference, I could experimentally kill CEOs, but it's not nice, but let's be less drastic. Instead of killing CEOs, we will... kill their first-degree relatives. If CEOs make a difference, they'll get upset. But if CEOs don't make a difference, who cares whether they get upset? And in fact, it happens. When the spouse or the only child of a CEO dies, the CEO really gets upset and the business income goes way down. The next worst is if a sibling of a CEO dies. The CEO gets upset, but not quite upset. And yes, these earnings Speaker 2 (16:53) go down. Proportionally. Interesting. The punchline of this is amazing. Speaker 1 (16:57) If a parent dies, you get upset, but you expect parents to die. So the earnings go down, but less. If you're... in-law dies, your mother-in-law or your father-in-law, if mother-in-law dies, that's the only death which produces that increase in earnings. But the sample size is small, the effect is small, and it's not quite statistically significant. Speaker 3 (17:22) That's very funny. Speaker 1 (17:24) What it means is that without being permitted to do the manipulative experiment, we can analyze the natural experiment that Relatives of various degrees of closeness die, and those deaths, psychologists will tell us, some of those deaths are a bigger blow than other deaths. So that's a natural experiment. Speaker 2 (17:43) So let's go through some of the columns. We touched on it for a second, but if we start with politics and history, I cannot pronounce his name, but Kama? Soretzi Kama. Soretzi Kama, who we talked about, I think, sufficiently. If we added up the fact that he was the first president of a brand new nation. that was incredibly poor, didn't have a lot of college-educated folks, didn't have paved roads, had no foreseeable access to money or resources. He's unique. He makes some unique decisions. Yeah, he keeps around some British administrators that have a lot of experience with administration and bureaucracy. That's kind of a rare choice that he makes. Once they discover the diamonds, as we talked about, he is in this position to grant all of those mineral rights to the people of the country. He proves that he's an extraordinary leader and that he is unusually high discretion. Anything he says pretty much goes. And crucial decisions plus some favorable circumstances. and perfect timing makes him an enormously impactful individual. And then maybe to counter him, let's talk about Rachel Carson. Who is Rachel Carson? Speaker 1 (18:47) The two science books in the last 170 years that made the biggest impact on the world were Darwin's Origin of Species, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, about the damage to... lands and to animals and to people caused by toxic chemicals, jump-started the environmental revolution. Now, Rachel Carson was unique. She passed the Hamlet test as Sretsy Kama. She was uniquely qualified to do it because she was a scientist, so other scientists answered her letters. From childhood on, she wrote. prose, but she read the prose back to herself. She listened to it, so she was a writer, but she was also a poet whose writing style is still the most beautiful writing style of scientists today. She could have Speaker 2 (19:41) just been a beautiful novelist, but also had this biology background. Speaker 1 (19:46) Right. Compared to the best other science writers, Richard Dawkins, who is terrific, Paul Ehrlich, who was terrific, Rachel Carson's writing style is still... much better because she read it back and she listened to it with the ear of a poet. Two other advantages of Rachel Carson. She was not a university professor. In those days, if you were a university professor writing for the public, that was really bad because it meant you're writing for the public because your career is washed up and you're prostituting yourself, so you turn to writing for the public. It's still the case today. Really? The only time UCLA denied me a promotion was when I won the Pulitzer Prize. Speaker 3 (20:24) Oh, my God. Speaker 1 (20:25) Which proved that I was prostituted. What? That's crazy. Speaker 3 (20:29) It Speaker 1 (20:30) is crazy, but that's academia. Can Speaker 2 (20:31) you answer Speaker 1 (20:32) the psychology Speaker 2 (20:32) behind that? I mean, I understand publishing in peer-reviewed journals and that that's the high watermark for anyone under their employ. They're trying to get their university to have massive cachets, so the more peer-reviewed journal published, the higher that rises. Why does a book for the public diminish that? Speaker 1 (20:51) Partly it's envy. Sure. So someone who writes a successful book for the public is doing what other academics would like to do, although they won't admit it. And it's also the case that there's a belief that if you're writing a book for the public, it's because you can no longer write good. papers that get 32 citations in the Journal of Planetary and Earth Science. And Speaker 3 (21:13) nobody reads Speaker 1 (21:13) it. And nobody reads it except 31 other planetary scientists. Yeah, exactly. So there's a feeling that if you're writing a book for the public, you're doing it because you're all washed up. And since you're all washed up, you prostitute yourself. But Rachel Carson, with her beautiful writing style, a man who wrote with a beautiful writing style, who wrote like a poet. Everybody would be suspicious about that man. Rachel Carson is a woman. It's okay for a woman to write with a beautiful writing style. And so for all those reasons... Rachel Carson, I think, passes the Hamlet death, was uniquely qualified to write Silent Spring. Speaker 2 (21:49) Also what was relevant, she really exposed DDT as being the big chemical that we later found out was what was killing, right, the bald eagles. And so that gets to Kennedy, this book, and then all of a sudden we have the EPA and we do outlaw DDT, which is great. Speaker 1 (22:03) In the case of... In the business world, do you drink pomegranate juice? I don't personally, but I'm very, very aware of it. Pomegranates were domesticated something like 4,000 B.C. They've been around for a long time. Yes, you can get juice out of them. In Middle Eastern markets, until the year 2002, there was no pomegranate juice industry in the U.S. In the Middle East, you could go to a Saturday market. and the salesman would cut open a pomegranate and squeeze a glass of pomegranate. But there was no pomegranate juice industry. The reason is that they're hard. Much of the medical benefit and much of the flavor is in the rind, but you can't do it like an orange, cutting it in half and squeeze it. Instead, to make pomegranate juice, you need literally a three-story press that can grind this really hard stuff and get the juice out of it. Well, as of 2002... pomegranates being Mediterranean climate plants. Pomegranates were grown in the United States, only in California, and there were about 22 pomegranate farmers in California. Of those 22 pomegranate farmers, 21 were ordinary, poor farmers, so they did not launch a pomegranate juice industry. But Linda Resnick ran a company, successful company. She had lots of money. Her husband invested some of the money in... buying acreage in the Central Valley so that they're now the largest agricultural landowners in California. And he discovered that on his land were 125 pomegranate trees about which he knew nothing. But Linda Resnick read about them and learned that they might have medical value. So she invests $150 million in learning what the medical value is. And then they build this three-story press because they've got other products. So in 2002, they launched the pomegranate juice. We're upon Coca-Cola and Nestle jump in and start producing fake pomegranate juice. So they spend another $120 million suing Coca-Cola and so on Speaker 2 (23:54) in Speaker 1 (23:54) the Supreme Court. These other 22 farmers, first of all, they don't have the $150 million. But on top of that, they have tiny fractions of the market. Even if they had $150 million, it wouldn't be worth spending $150 million if you only have a tiny fraction of the market. But the Resnick's had produced half the pomegranate juice in the United States. Plus they had... the money. Plus, their company was not a public stock company whose stockholders would have said, for heaven's sakes, don't waste our money at all. Yeah, some Speaker 2 (24:21) unproven beverage in the already oversaturated beverage market. Speaker 1 (24:25) That's right. They controlled their money. And so it took them 18 years to make a profit on it. It was not a way to get rich. They got rich in other ways. But they passed the Hamlet test because out of those 22... pomegranate farmers. They were the only ones who controlled enough of the market and who had enough money and who had the money themselves, not as a stock company, that they could lose money on pomegranates for 18 years. Speaker 2 (24:50) Yeah, there's likely never a pomegranate beverage without her. She has this kink about finding medicinal outcomes for existing ripe plants and fruits. Like, you got to have her weird interest in that to then bring this thing to market. Speaker 1 (25:08) Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, Speaker 2 (25:11) if you dare. We get support from YouTube Premium. Okay, I got to tell you something. I just got YouTube Premium this year, and it's completely enhanced how I use YouTube. I already liked YouTube for obvious reasons. I'm watching all my car stuff on there. Everything. Everything's on there. And thought, how could YouTube get any better? Well... Premium has awesome features like offline downloads. Just use it on a plane ride. So I can download my favorite automotive shows and videos to watch when I'm on the go. And that means I don't have to wait when I don't have Wi-Fi, which is especially great when I'm traveling and don't have guaranteed Wi-Fi on airplanes. Speaking of not waiting, and this is my favorite part, YouTube Premium is ad-free, so I can watch uninterrupted whenever, wherever. 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So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Allstate North American Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. Speaker 2 (27:09) Before we move into businesses, I just want to say or ask you, you do survey 22 modern political leaders, Churchill, Mandela, Mao, Idi Amin, a bunch. What patterns emerge when you look at these 22 modern political leaders? Speaker 1 (27:25) Certainly all of them had discretion. Some of them were dictators. Some of them were wartime leaders, Winston Churchill. Some of them were founders. Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew. Those are things shared among them. But there was one thing shared among them that I hadn't expected. I noticed when I went over the table. Of those 22 founders, there were only two who retired voluntarily. Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew. The other 20 founders... didn't retire voluntarily. They committed suicide like Hitler, or they got assassinated like Anwar Sadat, or they got voted out of office like Winston Churchill. So what it means is that once you become an outstanding political leader... and you've developed a high opinion of yourself, you're not likely to lose that high opinion of yourself and step down voluntarily. That was a surprise for me. Speaker 3 (28:18) Yeah, that's interesting. Speaker 2 (28:20) Yeah, it's a good bit of knowledge that we should keep in mind if and when we ever get a charismatic leader that we all love. We need to go, and this person will never show themselves the way out. I mean, that's part of the reason we have term limits, right, on presidents. But it's why they're so crucial, because we know none of them will leave voluntarily. Speaker 1 (28:39) Well, two out of 20. But Nelson Mandela, he was 90 years old. And Lee Kuan Yew, he'd been in office for 40 years. 40 years is enough. Yeah, Speaker 2 (28:48) I Speaker 1 (28:49) mean, Speaker 2 (28:49) they left, but come on. I mean, they also didn't leave. Okay, so when we look at business, you have Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Musk not passing the Hamlet test. Speaker 1 (29:01) None of them passed the Hamlet test. Speaker 2 (29:03) Let me be clear. I don't enjoy this man's personality. But I have to say, after reading the book on Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, I find him largely repugnant. But also, any industry he has entered, he has had impossible success. When you're reading that book, you're thinking Tesla, but you're forgetting that he started OpenAI. He also has SpaceX, which is the most successful. And then he had prior to that, the money exchange thing he had. You don't think he's unique in his Shakespearean? skill set? If he Speaker 1 (29:37) is, it's impossible to prove it because whereas Shakespeare was one of, what, 20 Elizabethan dramatists, Elon Musk, he was one of 320 million Americans. How can you go through all of those 320 million Americans the way you can go through the 21 other Shakespearean dramatists? And one by one you say, no, he couldn't, she couldn't. But Speaker 2 (29:56) we have 10,000 known engineers, mechanical engineers. Speaker 1 (30:00) by all means, in your spare time, please go Speaker 3 (30:03) through Speaker 1 (30:05) those 10,000 mechanical engineers. It'll be more difficult than going through Shakespeare's 21 contemporaries, and it hasn't been done. Speaker 2 (30:13) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't please me to announce this, but I do think he is an Edison-like figure. Speaker 1 (30:19) That's possible. Speaker 3 (30:20) Yeah, but there's also other competitors in the market. So it's not like Tesla's the only one. If it was still the only one, maybe you could say that. But I feel like it still was a revolution apart from him. Speaker 2 (30:34) Yeah, I mean, SpaceX still one of one. You've got Bezos trying to do it. But SpaceX is very one of one. And then the satellite network he somehow launches, five thousands. I mean, it's astronomical what this one human being has accomplished. But maybe in history, through the lens of history, we will be better able to. gauge whether or not he was an Edison or just at the right place at the right time. Speaker 1 (30:57) Right. And of the other big four, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, etc., they were all undoubtedly very talented people. Were they less outstanding, less unique than Elon Musk? Maybe. But it's not possible to make the argument the way you can for Shakespeare unless in your remaining years you wish to go through those 10,000 of them. No, Speaker 2 (31:19) I'm far too into boating. Okay, so you took a very quantitative look at whether CEOs matter. We scratched it a little bit. But let's talk about when CEOs die, what happens. We have some good data on that. Speaker 1 (31:37) When CEOs die, the best data set is for Denmark. It's a small country. There are only 76,000 businesses in Denmark, 76,000 CEOs. A professor at Copenhagen Business School, since he went through 76,000, you go there with your 10,000. So when CEOs die, the business earnings drop. That's on the average. Speaker 2 (32:00) Like 13 % within two years is the number in the book. Something like that, Speaker 1 (32:04) yeah. showing that CEOs have some effect. But is the CEO the only person who affects the earnings of a company? And there, it's clear no. Again, these professors at business schools have looked at the factors that affect company earnings, and there are four. Perhaps the first thing you would think of is the year. 1930 was a bad year to... run a stock company in the United States, the year of the Depression. 2008 was not a good year in the United States. So the year makes a difference. Second thing that makes the difference, of course, is the company. Procter & Gamble has been a very well-run company for 150 years. And CEO after CEO, there are some industries that are profitable. When you do the statistics, it turns out that the CEO and the individual company and... the industry are roughly equal in accounting for roughly one-third of profits, and the individual year, despite 1930, on the average accounts for only between 1 and 6 % of profits. So that's a case where statisticians can