#2549 - Jared Diamond

The Joe Rogan Experience

In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, renowned scientist and historian Jared Diamond discusses his latest book, 'Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,' reflecting on the profound impact of leadership,

Key takeaways

• Leadership success depends on being at the right time and place, but also requires exceptional personal qualities.
• Historical outcomes are often shaped by chance events, such as Hitler surviving a near-fatal car accident or Genghis Khan's birth during an unusually wet period in Mongolia.

Main topics

• The role of chance and circumstance in history
• Leadership and its impact on civilization

Notable quotes

"If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan."

"We thought we were done with that forever. I don't believe that anymore."

Conclusion

Jared Diamond concludes that history is shaped by a complex interplay of individual

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Speaker 1 (0:11) Very nice to meet you, sir. It's a pleasure. Great pleasure to meet you. I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I just got into this yesterday, and today I started reading your new book. Awesome. Awesome so far. Fascinating. I have so many questions. But my first one is, have you done podcasts before? I've done podcasts, quite a few podcasts, at home in my wife's study on my wife's screen, and I've done... face-to-face interviews like with you. Oh, okay. Cool. So, first of all, why did you write this book? Why did I write this book? Speaker 1 (0:53) A short answer is I was born in 1937, which means that I grew up in the Second World War under the shadow of Hitler. Every day there was something going on with the war. My father pasted up on the wall of my bedroom a map of the European theater and the Pacific theater. And there was always the question, why did it happen? And if it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still have been that outcome? Then I moved to Europe. I lived in England. I lived in Germany. I love German music. I love the German language. Why? And then I moved to Chile. I lived in Chile, the most democratic country of South America. Before Pinochet, nobody saw what was coming with Pinochet. His own fellow generals didn't see it coming. And so there's been throughout my life this question. Speaker 1 (1:50) do bad as well as good people make a difference? Also, my wife was post. The last of my family in Europe disappeared in the Holocaust. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz. She survived, but others of the family didn't survive. And so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question. And then leaders that made a difference in my life, there was the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department who, when a pump... water pump that I had been operating blew overnight and it flooded my lab room, but it also flooded the lab room below me. And that was a poor choice of lab room to flood because it belonged to Lord Adrian, Nobel Prize winner, the father of father-in-law of my thesis supervisor and the master of my college at Cambridge. Not a good choice. Oh, no. The chairman of the department. Speaker 1 (2:48) department, called me in. I thought I'm going to be thrown out. He said that was sloppy. You have to be careful with water pumps and be more careful in the future. That permitted my scientific career to continue. Other people might have thrown me out. So leaders have made a difference in my life. Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world. And one of the things that really terrifies me is Nazi Germany was not that long ago. And there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again. That that type of scenario where a group of people are completely other to the point where they're not human anymore, that a nation goes along with it, like that, we thought we were done with that forever. I don't believe that anymore. Speaker 1 (3:46) As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is and that there is always these battles of, for lack of better terms, good and evil. Good leaders who generally just want something good for their people. They want to leave a mark and be remembered as someone who made a difference. And then leaders who just want to take over all the systems and make sure they can't be contested and want to dominate the country and change it. And you make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance and about all these different factors that lead to leaders either having successful runs or not successful. There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration. You open the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident. And what would the world have looked like if these cars had just been moving? Speaker 1 (4:43) One was two seconds ahead. One was two seconds behind. Perfect impact. Dead Hitler. Now what? What would the world look like? There's so many instances. What if JFK didn't get shot? What if Martin Luther King Jr. didn't get shot? There's so many different moments in history where you go, how would culture look? How would society, how would civilization look if just a few things had been off? There are so many things to say about what you've just said. So growing up after World War II, we thought, never again. And yet in Cambodia, Pol Pot killed about one quarter of the Cambodian population in evil ways. He encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet, nobody expected what... Speaker 1 (5:35) Pinochet did in Chile. His body count was nowhere near Hitler's body count because Chile is a small country. And Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large fraction of the population. But the tortures that he implied, there were far worse than anything that the Nazis did. And he surprised his fellow generals. So all of that is a surprise. As for leaders can do either good. or bad, or they can do nothing. If you want a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference, Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers. But I can boil it down to four or five things. A leader has to be at the right time and place. Some leaders recognize that it's the right time and place, and they seize it. Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of Popular Electronics with the Intel 8080 chip. Speaker 1 (6:32) Bill Gates said to Steve Allen, now is the time. We've got to start now building a microcomputer because if we don't do it, somebody else will. So Bill Gates recognized that the time was right. And he made the time right. Winston Churchill recognized that the time was right. When Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister, he said, I knew that this was. the occasion for which my whole life was a preparation, but he didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill became prime minister because Germany invaded France, and Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France. He recognized that he was in the right time and place. There are other leaders who are at the right time and place, but they don't know it. Mark Zuckerberg. Speaker 1 (7:20) Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I think, in 2004. As a result of his having been born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year of his birth. But 2004 was an ideal time to jumpstart social media because there had been some before and some afterwards. But the changes in the Internet made 2004 a particularly good year. So leaders, some leaders... choose the time and place. De Gaulle did. Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill did. And some leaders, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. And yet there were other people who tried, like Adolfo Han and Timur the Turk. Why did... Speaker 1 (8:15) Genghis Khan succeed. Well, within the last 10 years, students of tree rings have figured out that on the Mongolian steppe, the wettest time in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth. If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan. But he happened to have been born at the right time and place because with all that rain, that meant... hay to feed sheep and goats to feed Mongol babies. And it also meant hay to feed Mongol horses to ride into battle. So Genghis Khan was someone at the right time and place, but he had no idea. And we didn't have any idea until this tree ring study of the last decade. That's interesting. But you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful? Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist. And he was incredibly ruthless. And Speaker 1 (9:13) fantastic at organizing different groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions. So he accepted all religions. And it was one of his strengths is that he didn't care. I'll take you all in. Everybody gets to come in here. And the way he would attack these cities, there's also the strategy of they never settled down. They always were in tents. And they would camp out in front of cities and just wait them out. I mean, there was a lot to it other than just resources, right? Absolutely. He's kind of an extraordinary individual. It took two things together. The second thing, the first thing was that he was at the right time and place. But he also had to be an extraordinary person. If he had been an equally extraordinary person at some other time and place, we wouldn't know anything about him. So you are correct. At a given time and place. Speaker 1 (10:08) That may be the occasion for someone to emerge, but who emerges depends upon the personal qualities. For example, to take religion. The first century AD of the Roman Empire was the perfect time and place to found what would become the world religion 15 centuries later because the Roman Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia. And so Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then, but the Roman Empire was basically the father of the European countries that spread around the world 15 centuries later. Now, Jesus Christ didn't pick the place where he was born. Neither he nor his followers had any idea that 15 centuries later. Speaker 1 (11:00) The religion that grew up in the Roman Empire then would spread around the world. It was the right time and place, but there were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got killed by the Romans. Of the six candidates, Christ was the most successful. But Christ also, to found a religion, you have to be charismatic, number one. You have to be a... outstanding organizer. Christ died too early. It was St. Paul who was the outstanding organizer. And often religions also need a great general. In some cases, the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer. Muhammad was an outstanding, he was charismatic. Speaker 1 (11:52) was a great organizer, was a great general. The Mahdi of the Sudan, who established this empire in East Africa, fantastic general and organizer and incredibly charismatic. But the Mahdi, he was in the right place to establish an empire in East Africa, but he wasn't in the right place to establish a world empire because East Africa just didn't have the technology and the demographics. we are as Christianity did. The Paul thing is very interesting because the more I read about the Bible and the construction of it, the more it just gives you pause. Like Paul was really kind of the creator of Christianity because he never met Jesus. So Jesus never spoke to him and Jesus never wrote anything down. And so when Paul has this vision, when he's on the road to Damascus and he has this, whatever it is, some spiritual encounter. Speaker 1 (12:52) that he says he met Jesus. Like, we're taking the entire religion is based on this guy saying that I think he said all these things 20 years after he said them when no one wrote it down and I never met him. So it's really Paul. Yes and no. It was two people. It was Jesus and there was Paul. Yes, Paul was the great organizer. Jesus of those various other rival messiahs. Jesus had some advantages with his message. It was a universal message. It was not directed just to the Romans. It was not directed just to men. It was aimed at everybody. Speaker 1 (13:38) Of the candidate messiahs then, Jesus had a particularly good message. But a good message isn't enough. It took St. Paul as the organizer. But it's fascinating that Paul never met him and that Jesus never wrote anything down. So when Paul's talking about this, this is literally just from verbal history. Right. Which is really strange. An oral history that it takes 20 years before this guy says, This is what Jesus said. And then we all go on that. Right. What's thought to be the first of the Gospels, the Gospel according to Mark, is estimated to have been written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus. Yeah. So we have no first-person accounts of Jesus. It would be really nice if he wrote things down. Speaker 1 (14:34) It would have made things more certain. In the case of Muhammad, it was two centuries before things got written down. So we know even less about Muhammad than we do about Jesus. Or a difference also between Muhammad and Jesus is that Jesus, we know, was at the right place and right time. The Western Roman Empire, we know, was at the peak of its power. Why on earth did Saudi Arabia produce a... world religion then? Was it that, as with Genghis Khan in Mongolia, was it that at the time of Mohammed's birth, was Saudi Arabia undergoing a particularly wet time, which meant lots of people, which meant lots of arms? We don't have the weather information about Arabia, so we don't know why. We don't know whether. We infer that probably... Speaker 1 (15:25) Muhammad was at the right place in the right time, but we can't nail it down the way we can with Genghis Khan and the way we can with Jesus. It's interesting, too, because Muhammad was essentially a prophet, right? He wasn't a child. He wasn't the son of God. It's like we know there was a man that existed during that time, and he became this religious leader. The religion is founded on his thoughts and his ideas, essentially. of course written down hundreds of years later. It's just incredible how many different versions of that kind of a system, these religious systems, where someone becomes the person who has all the rules and everyone follows those rules or you're ostracized from the kingdom. And there's so many of them. Speaker 1 (16:15) The thing is we know some of the people who created it, like Muhammad or like Jesus or like Joseph Smith. Like there's some weird ones. And it's just – it's a very strange pattern that comes up over and over and over again. I don't know how all of them can be correct without any judgments on religion. Someone's got to be wrong if you all have completely different origin stories. But it's so fascinating to me in particular that people want – to have this sort of a structure. It gives them comfort. And you can get entire populations to go along with it. Right. One might say that the religious teachings are secondary. In the case of 19th century American history, the United States gave rise to five religions that have gone around the world. Mormon religion, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses. Speaker 1 (17:11) and Christian science. Why have the Mormons been so successful? Was it because of Joseph Smith's teachings? With due respect to the Mormons, the religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merit, but the Mormons were very well organized under Brigham Young and the social features of the Mormon religion. their optimism, their emphasis on living a fulfilling life, on being happy, and they're expecting every Mormon. If you are a Mormon, you tithe yourself. You don't fill out a 1040 income tax form. Mormons are expected to devote 10% of their... their income to the church and they calculated themselves. So that's a big, big commitment. So the Mormon religion, I would say, has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, but because he was charismatic and because Brigham Young then was an outstanding leader. Speaker 1 (18:24) This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years it's been one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my brain locked in, and that's ketones, an energy molecule our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Ketones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only used by super elite people. But now, thanks to a $6 million research contract with the military, Ketone IQ had a breakthrough and you can finally get ketones online. on Amazon or at Target for $5 a shot. They don't taste good, but damn do they work. Trust me, if you rely on your brain for your day-to-day success like I do, Speaker 1 (19:06) Take Ketone IQ. I take it and I love it. I feel sharper. I make better decisions. I have faster memory recall and I'm more productive. Your brain thrives on ketones. Go to ketone.com slash Rogan for 30% off your subscription order or find Ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide in the protein and electrolyte aisle and get your first shot free. They're so confident in it that they even offer a 60-day money-back guarantee. Go ahead and take your shot. They've also done an excellent job of instilling a sense of community amongst fellow Mormons that I think is, I don't think there's another religion that quite has reached that level. They are the nicest people. Like, I have yet to run into an asshole that's a Mormon. It's kind of shocking. You know, if the whole origin story wasn't so, as the kids say, sus. Speaker 1 (20:00) It would make you really be interested in like what's going on here. It seems like these guys have it nailed other than the nine wives and all that other jazz. But that seems like an offset of the original idea. With due respect to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a virgin birth and ascent to heaven is – stretching scientific understanding. And I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in a virgin birth was a major factor propelling Christianity. Instead, there were many things that propelled Christianity. This gets interesting. The Christians outbred pagans in the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire because... Speaker 1 (20:56) Roman religion had a low view of women. Children did not have a high prestige. There was frequent abortion, whereas Christianity, from the early Christianity, did give a high role to women compared to Roman religion. Christianity favored... having babies. Christianity emphasized taking care of the sick. And so when you look at tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire, Christians lived longer and they were less likely to die than were pagans. And the result was that Christianity that started out as a... Speaker 1 (21:44) maybe a few dozen people under Jesus. And even in St. Paul's time, what, maybe 100 people, Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire. On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism emphasized writing. And so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, there were all these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate. Christianity had reasons for its success that would, due respect, have nothing to do with the virgin birth. Yeah, of course. It's really interesting the way you just outlined the reason why Christianity was successful. You could say that that same pattern is being mirrored by Muslims, that they strict adherence to religion. They emphasize having many children and they take care of the community. And their populations are rising. Speaker 1 (22:37) While a lot of secular people, their populations are dropping off. That's true. With Muslims, as with Christianity. Speaker 1 (22:49) I would not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam. Instead, the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and social connections, and maybe, although we don't know something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during... Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs I see as the reason behind Islam spread. Trevor Burrus Well, whatever was the origin of the original way of constructing it, the way it's practiced today, the people that are Muslims are devoutly Muslims. There's a large population of them that are very religious. Speaker 1 (23:43) And that population is very – I think that whole very strong belief system is very attractive to people because most people are very undecisive. They don't really know why they're here. They don't really know what life is for, existential angst. Society seems pointless, the constant pursuit of material possessions with a finite lifespan. Something that – you can join where everyone is all in and they're very locked in and disciplined. And that discipline, you know, it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day. It takes a lot where everyone agrees. We're all going to play music and pray five times a day. And we're a part of a team. And if you leave, the punishment is death. So if you decide that you don't want to be a part of this anymore and you don't believe anymore and you announce that. Speaker 1 (24:36) They can kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like you're all in and you're all in for life and we all support each other. And it's a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people. Like it doesn't appeal to me like I want to join it. But when I watch these people give speeches and I watch them express their views and beliefs, the confidence that they have is something that is. very attractive to people. And I think that confidence is a weird, that charismatic confidence is a weird aspect of human beings in that we follow those people like universally, like we follow charismatic, confident people universally and charismatic, confident people that have a very strong belief system. And you got all these other people that are part of the strong belief system. There's a... Speaker 1 (25:26) compelling force that makes you want to join. Something of that is also true of Mormonism, although in somewhat different ways. Right. It's less militant, but it's very compelling that they believe so much. That's right. And it's compelling that 18-year-olds, every 18-year-old Mormon man is expected to go devote two years to... to proselytizing. And if you don't have much money, you go 70 miles away. And if you do have money, you go to the Pacific Ocean or to Europe with the result that Europe... But these people take it seriously. Yes. And so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe and the Pacific. There's one other thing that I'd like to say here, and that is that people often ask me, Jared Gunsner and Steele... Speaker 1 (26:22) neglects individual people. It's about things that happened over the last 10,000 years. And Guns, Germs, and Steel, the different outcomes of societies and different content, has nothing to do with any individual. Whereas here, you've written a book about leaders, about individuals. How do you reconcile Guns, Germs, and Steel with leaders? And my first response would be to say that Guns, Germs, and Steel is about... entire continents for 10,000 years where one person doesn't make a difference. Whereas my book about leaders is about individuals in the short term. But the one case that I can think of where an individual makes a difference 2,000 years later is in religion. The beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Muhammad. Those individuals Speaker 1 (27:17) had a long-lasting effect. And so far, it looks as if the beliefs of Joseph Smith, he's been gone for, what, 200 years now. But the prospects are that Joseph Smith, again, will have a long-lasting influence. Whereas I can't think of a politician or a business person who has had an effect 2,000 years later. Well, I think guns, germs and steel highlighted all the factors that have to be in place for these types of changes to take place. It's not like mutually exclusive that leaders aren't important as well. Like it seems like they both work together hand in hand, but those leaders wouldn't have been able to do what they did without all of the innovation, without the industry, without the infrastructure that these places had, without the wet. Speaker 1 (28:12) season that the Genghis Khan and the Mongols had fortunately arrived in. Like all those factors kind of all have to be in place. It's not either or, right? Yeah. So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, they were convincing priests and devoted priests. But behind these convincing devoted priests priests were European guns, germs, and steel, European smallpox, European measles that killed far more Native Americans than did European guns and horses. So religion... Speaker 1 (28:59) To become worldwide, religion needs what one can call an economic and demographic engine. The Mahdi of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him are of his being incredibly charismatic and his military success as a general. His small troops with sticks and stones nevertheless wiped out British-led Egyptian armies with... machine guns, and then his organizational ability. So the Mahdi was able to set up an empire in East Africa, but he didn't have the economic and demographic push to spread his religion around the world. Yeah, a lot of factors have to be in place, and sometimes the chips all align perfectly. Speaker 1 (29:52) Right. Let's think... Keep that microphone up to your face. My apologies. You have the reverse off. So examples of everything aligning. In the business world, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs... Speaker 1 (30:12) Out of 340 million Americans today, 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were getting launched, it's impossible to make an argument that nobody except Bill Gates had the business know-how and the computer skills to found personal computers. But he was there at the right place and right time. And again, Jeff Bezos, he recognized that it was the right time. He went to the head of the company that had hired him, and he said, the Internet has multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the last year. This is the perfect time to set up an everything store based on the Internet. So he recognized that the time was right. Speaker 1 (31:09) Yeah, and imagine what would have happened if you tried to do that. It's like what he did was really fascinating because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea, like sell books, sell books online. Like, okay, but you can get books at Barnes & Noble. You can get books anywhere. There was bookstores everywhere. It was kind of easy to get books. But then the whole you can buy toothpaste too. And everything, like, in just one click, like, all that revolutionized. And it all appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and more lazy and more and more short attention span, TikTok-y, it became the perfect way to buy things. One click. It was like all the green lights. He was driving down the boulevard, and every light turned green right when he got to it. Speaker 1 (31:54) Brilliant. Right. In the case of Jeff Bezos, it was not that his goal in life was to set up an online bookstore. It was his goal – explicitly his goal in life was to set up an everything store. But he recognized that an everything store has to start out with something. Really? So he started out with books? He started out with books because he recognized that books were an ideal thing to start out with. All books are uniform. It's not that you buy a diamond and 78. They're a different time. All the books are uniform. And there are a couple of warehouses for books where he could get books and anybody else could get books. And customers in stores, they're not going to look around to see what is the best copy of Jared Diamond's Prophets. Every copy is the same. Speaker 1 (32:49) Jeff Bezos reckoned explicitly that books are a good thing to start out with. Having started out with books, he then reasoned what are good things to move on to. And he moved on to perfume and jewelry. He waited quite a while to move on to whatever else he moved on to. He was strategic. It's kind of amazing because if it didn't take place, what would online shopping look like? Would somebody else have figured that out? I wonder. That's a great example. There was online. Sorry. There were everything stores. But not to that level. Not to that level. Before Jeff Bezos. Before Jeff Bezos, there was eBay. eBay operates in a different way. And after Jeff Bezos, Walmart. Speaker 1 (33:47) has set up its own everything store. But Walmart's everything store is based on, coupled to a brick-and-mortar store, whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from the beginning was his everything store was going to be an online store. So here's an example that indicates that without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores. We've got Walmart and we've got eBay. But Jeff Bezos put his distinctive... stamp on everything stores by making an online everything store. Also being the first to figure out the whole one-click thing. When you have an account, your credit card's listed, you know what you need? Bam, one click. Toilet paper on the way, arrives by 4 p.m. Let's go. You don't have to go to the store. And now you can get groceries delivered too. And eventually it's going to be robots showing up at your house delivering these things, which is... Speaker 1 (34:41) probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right now with drones, right? Yeah. This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic. Out of 340 million Americans, if Jeff Bezos hadn't done it, maybe somebody else would have done it. But what we know for sure is that there were and before and there were afterwards. other ways to develop an everything store. What Jeff Bezos did was to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction to hell with whether