Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

16:23Jared Diamond:The pomegranate juice market consisted of a salesperson squeezing a single glass of juice at a market. It's difficult to make pomegranate juice. Orange juice is easy to make. You cut the orange in half and it's soft inside. Pomegranates, much of the value of the pomegranates is in this very hard rind. And the contents of pomegranates is not a mush like orange juice. But it's these tiny seeds. The way that pomegranate juice is now made on a large scale consists of a three-story tower that squeezes the entire pomegranate, including the rind. It's much more difficult than making orange juice. So there was no pomegranate juice industry for 5 ,000 years around the world.

17:11Jared Diamond:In the United States, there was no industry until 2002. In 2002, there were about 22 pomegranate growers in the United States. They were all in California. 21 of them were mall farmers without much money, without the motivation to invest huge amounts of money. Linda Resnick got interested in the medical value of pomegranates, and she sank huge amounts of money, a couple hundred million dollars. It took her 18 years to start making money on pomegranates. None of those 22 other farmers had the$150 million to pour in or would have waited 18 years. And the big companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle, they never would have permitted a branch of their industry to sink$150 million and not make a profit for 18 years.

18:01Tyler Cowen:Are you convinced that the relative success of Botswana will endure? Their current politics seems much more personalized, much more corrupt. With artificial diamonds, the value of their most important resource is headed to some very low sum. Won't they just revert to mean and it won't have been an enduring success?

18:21Jared Diamond:What one can say is that Botswana became independent in 1966, and it's now 60 years later. And Botswana, when it became independent, was the poorest country in Africa. and now Botswana for most of these 60 years has been either the richest or the second richest country in Africa. So for 60 years, they've got a great record.

18:44Tyler Cowen:What will happen in the next 60 years? I don't know. It's only, I think, 2 million people or so. I'm not sure of the number and one resource. So you divide up the value of the resource and they do well, but the value of the resource goes away and they're like Namibia, no? They have 3 million people

19:01Jared Diamond:and so the value of the diamonds is divided among only 3 million people instead of it divided among the 100 million people, as in the case of Nigeria. We've had artificial diamonds for quite a while now, and despite that, natural diamonds are still very popular. I know this firsthand because one of our two sons has just gotten engaged, and what he bought for his fiancée

19:22Tyler Cowen:was a natural diamond, not an artificial diamond. You have a section on John Wooden, the former basketball coach at UCLA, and when I think of his success as a coach, I'm most inclined to think his great talent was as a recruiter, not as a coach per se. What's your view on that? He gets Lou Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton, among others, to come to UCLA to play. Isn't it all about recruiting?

19:47Jared Diamond:Yes, that's recruiting, but recruiting was the least of his talents. He won national champions with Walton and with Alcindor, but he also won national championships without them. He was distinctive in many ways. his practices. He spent two and a half, three hours planning his practices. When he ran the practices, his players described him as, they said, when he ran the practices, we ran a play, and then he would say, do it faster, and then do it faster, fast, faster, with the result that his players could do things almost subconsciously. He also insisted on his plays being top-ranked addition.

20:29Jared Diamond:So there was a year when UCLA played against Duke and the Duke players were six foot nine and the UCLA players were six foot four, but John Wooden had trained his players to jump high. He was a great psychologist also. He understood his individuals. He understood teamwork. One of his decisive moves was that in a year when UCLA didn't do very well, he wondered, why is it? And he figured out that he was practicing his players just in groups of five, which meant that if one player had to pick a rest and another player was brought in, the other player hadn't worked out with that group. So he trained his players in groups of seven rather than five.

21:11Jared Diamond:And then finally, his players themselves, when they talked about John Wooden, they didn't talk about him as a basketball coach. They talked about him as a person. Bill Waltham said this, John Wooden made more difference in my life than anyone other than my mother and father, because for him, basketball was not a sport. Basketball was a metaphor for life.

21:36Tyler Cowen:If you think of your own model of the intellectual world, how consequential a figure are you? Would guns, germs, and steel in some other way have been written, rewritten, 10 years later if you hadn't done it, or it just would have been a vacuum? I have some prejudice. That's fine. Let's hear them.

21:55Jared Diamond:All right. So there are other books about the theme of Gunsjur and the Sea, which is why societies in different parts of the world had different successes. Why the argument of others is that it depended upon the distribution of domesticable plants and animals around the world. And it also depended upon the axes of the continents, Eurasia being east-west, the New World being north-south. contributions that I made were the role of domestic plants, domestic animals, in the development of infectious diseases. What killed the most Native Americans was not European swords and horses. It was European infectious diseases.

22:38Jared Diamond:But why did Native Americans not have their own infectious diseases to give back to Europeans? And the reason is that the epidemic infectious diseases of the modern world come from domestic animals, but the Fertile Crescent had the most domestic animals, five big domestic animals. The New World had only one big domestic animal, the llama, and the llama is not cuddly. We haven't gotten any infectious diseases from llamas, but I was a professor at a medical school. My brother-in-law was an expert in infectious disease, And so I did make a contribution in the importance of infectious disease and the reason why infectious diseases developed especially in the old world.

23:23Jared Diamond:Also, the importance of continental axes, the rapid spread east-west of domestic animals and of people and inventions. We were always at the same latitude and same day length. That was something that a botanist told me, but it's not something that students of history were aware of. And so I got that message from the botanist, and I put it in Guns, German, and Steel. So the fact is, Guns, German, and Steel has made a difference.

23:50Tyler Cowen:I'm prejudiced. What do you think of the people who say, if you take all the variables, put them in a cross-country regression, that it's really distance from the equator that dominates, and that that's the one factor, and that would have been discovered, say, eight years later? The answer of that is it's not distant from the equator at all.

24:08Jared Diamond:Of the centers of agriculture around the world, there are people who say Europe in the temperate zones, distant from the equator, helped Europe. Well, the domestic plants and animals of Europe and the writing of Europe and the metal tools of Europe and the centralized political governments of Europe were not developed in Europe. They were developed in the Fertile Crescent in Mediterranean latitudes. In the New World, the most advanced societies were not at high latitudes. Most advanced societies were the Maya of the Yucatan and the Incas close to the equator. So distance from the equator has not been a major factor, except that if you get too far from the equator, the Inwood and Siberians, you don't have agriculture there.

24:56Tyler Cowen:What is it you think that a typical, highly ambitious 25-year-old most misunderstands about becoming consequential?

25:05Jared Diamond:What is it that a 25-year-old most misunderstands about being consequential?

25:09Tyler Cowen:They come to you as a consultant and they say, Jared, I'm just dying to be consequential in human history. What is it that I should know? What should I do? What should I change? What can you teach me? What's the main lesson?

25:20Jared Diamond:What's the main lesson? The main lesson is learn to talk to people face-to-face and put away your indirect means of communication. Traditionally in New Guinea, there were no telephones. All communication was face-to-face. New Guineans are very skilled at communicating face-to-face, particularly in the last 40, 50 years. I've seen the deterioration of social skills. It's very striking. In New Guinea, I was environmental consultant for the Chevron oil fields in New Guinea. And there was an occasion where Chevron wanted to develop a new oil well. So they brought their international lawyers out from Switzerland to New Guinea to negotiate with New Guinea villagers who had never been out of their villages.

26:04Jared Diamond:The international lawyers thought, this is going to be a piece of cake. These people don't have experience of negotiating. In fact, New Guineans had far more experience at negotiating. They had far more negotiating tricks than did the international lawyers. The lawyers expected to be out of there with their agreement in a day. In fact, at the end of the first day, the international lawyers thought they had an agreement with the New Guineans. And the next morning, the New Guineans said, oh, no, that agreement, we are forgetting that agreement. The people made that agreement. They don't count. Here are some different negotiators.

26:37Jared Diamond:New Guineans had a wide range of negotiating skills because they spent their lives negotiating face-to-face. nowadays, particularly in the last 20 years. I'm shocked at the deterioration of social skills in the generation of my children, who are 39 years old, because most communication nowadays is not face-to-face, and so we don't understand people.

27:03Tyler Cowen:But aren't a lot of current political leaders, especially in America, highly skilled at social media? If I look at AOC, as we're speaking, she's favored to win the Democratic presidential nomination. She may or may not win the election, but she's basically well-known because of social media, or no? Well-known, yes.

27:22Jared Diamond:Politically skilled and socially skilled, no. Why not politically skilled? Because people today spend so much time dealing indirectly. You and I are now talking indirectly. The telephone was the first, indirect communication, telephone and radio. Then in came computers. Because I teach at UCLA, I've seen the shocking deterioration of writing skills and speaking skills in UCLA students in the last several decades. Why? Because the internet communication is indirect now, and they're not developing the socialist skills.

28:02Tyler Cowen:And so who are the people that you think are highly effective, whether or not you agree with them, but highly effective as leaders because of their direct face-to-face social skills?

28:12Jared Diamond:Highly effective as leaders. First of all, I won't pass judgment on leaders who are still active today because of premature. We can't yet judge Angela Merkel, Donald Trump.

28:25Tyler Cowen:We'll look sometime from now.

28:27Jared Diamond:Leaders in the business world, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. They made a difference. Each of them, none of them created his sphere without Jeff Bezos. We would have had Everything Store. There already was an Everything Store, namely eBay. But Jeff Bezos developed a distinctive sort of everything store, an online store that prioritized the customer. So those in the business world are some of the leaders who've made a difference.

29:03Tyler Cowen:Now, I've never been to Papua New Guinea, but should I think that the people there are smarter or possibly even genetically smarter? I will answer yes.

29:13Jared Diamond:And I will tell you, there have been people who hate me for saying that. You won't cancel tier. Don't worry. My impression, because I've spent 60 years out there, is that New Guineans are more curious, on the average they're more curious, smarter than are Westerners. Why is that? Think of how natural selection operates in New Guinea and how natural selection has operated in Europe in the last 10 ,000 years. In Europe, survival depended especially on surviving infectious diseases. It didn't depend so much on how smart you were, but it depended on whether you overcame the main causes of death, the infectious diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis and measles.

29:56Jared Diamond:In New Guinea, the main causes of death are dealing with this very difficult environment and dealing with other New Guineans because warfare is constant there. I think this explains why my impression that New Guineans are more curious and smarter than Westerners, I think this explains why it happened. But I must say, when I tell Americans or Europeans that New Guineans are, on the average, I think, smarter, they really hate to hear that. The usual view is that they're dumber because they had stone tools and they didn't have metal tools. Well, they didn't have metal tools because their agriculture was much less productive.

30:40Tyler Cowen:There was a recent piece in Nature, I think a few months ago, that argued there's genetic evidence that West Eurasians, since the Stone Age, have become somewhat smarter through whatever mechanisms of interbreeding. Do you think that's also true? I mean, you could imagine protecting yourself against infectious disease does require a lot of smarts. You've got to provision food. You've got to know what's coming. You have to build social alliances. right? Or maybe treat people the right way to whatever extent you can. Can't that also have been a positive mechanism for selection?

31:13Jared Diamond:The fact is that particularly European scientists went into great efforts for the last century ever since the IQ test to demonstrate that Europeans have higher IQs than do other people. And there's no evidence whatsoever for it. There are lots of people who try. I've not seen this particular Nature paper, but for more than a century, Eugenicists have been trying to argue that Europeans are smarter, and there's just no evidence that they're smarter.

31:38Tyler Cowen:But this paper doesn't show Europeans are smarter than other people. It just shows they're smarter than they were 25 ,000 years ago. How on earth would we demonstrate that Europeans are smarter now than they were 25 ,000 years ago?

31:50Jared Diamond:There's no way that you could demonstrate that. We know that 25 ,000 years ago, Europeans and Indonesians were making great art, the great art of Lascaux. We know that about 80 ,000 years ago, there was a takeoff in human societies with much more rapid inventions, inventions gradually of finer stone tools and inventions of clothing and sewn clothing. What happened 80 ,000 years ago? My guess, and this is something that I argued in my book, The Third Chimpanzee, my guess is that that great leap forward of 80 ,000 years ago might have been associated with the development of complex human language.

32:33Jared Diamond:Human language requires a complex voice box. Chimpanzees can produce about four vowels and consonants, but the voice box of chimpanzees cannot produce complex spoken language. My guess is that it might have been changes in the voice box 80 ,000 years ago that resulted in the great leap forward that then resulted in art and much finer stone tools.

32:59Tyler Cowen:Are you familiar with Greg Clark's hypotheses in economic history that the English in particular, possibly also the Dutch, that they interbred themselves into lower rates of time preference, more savings, more investment, more patience, and that that's why the Industrial Revolution came to England? Do you have a view on that?

33:18Jared Diamond:Why did the Industrial Revolution come to England? England is an island. England did not need standing armies. England did not constantly get invaded. In fact, the last successful invasion of England was 1066. England being an island allowed England not to need an army, gradually to develop democracy. democracy is a productive form of government. Also, England is on the Atlantic coast. England and the Netherlands and first Spain and Portugal, they were the countries that spread around the world because they were on the Atlantic coast. Also, Spain was on the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean was the testing ground for developing ships and navigation that were then used across the Atlantic.

34:05Jared Diamond:So I'd say that it was geography that accounts for England's predominance.

34:10Tyler Cowen:Deirdre McCloskey attributes the differences to ideology, individualism, ideas of liberty, enlightenment, and maybe to some extent Christianity. What do you think of her work?

34:21Jared Diamond:I don't know her work, but the idea that it has to do with the enlightenment, related to what I was just telling you, that in the case of England, not having an army meant that England could develop a democracy. It was in the 1600s that England chopped off the head of its king, and then Parliament became powerful in England. But democracy, as Winston Churchill said, is the worst form of government except for all other forms of government that have been tried. With democracy, you can suggest an idea, and there's not a dictator who will tell you to shut up. Also, in the case of Netherlands, So why did the Industrial Revolution begin first in England, democracy to devastating army, and why did it next spread to the Netherlands?

35:07Jared Diamond:Partly because the Netherlands faces England, but also the Netherlands was a democracy early.

35:13Tyler Cowen:Do you have a view on the historical theories of Daron and Asimoglu, that it's fundamentally about whether or not you have extractive institutions versus inclusive institutions?

35:23Jared Diamond:Yes, I do have here Darren and Jim Robinson who shared the Nobel Prize together, particularly Jim Robinson. I've had more to do than Jim Robinson. I've learned more from Jim Robinson in the last 20 years than from any other individual. It was Jim who taught me the power of natural experiments. My career was as a laboratory scientist, as a gallbladder scientist, who did manipulative experiments in the laboratory. But on people, we can't do manipulative experiments. You can't go around experimentally killing people and seeing what happens. In my work in New Guinea, studying New Guinea birds, I can't go around exterminating New Guinea birds.

36:00I had to develop techniques of natural experiments, comparing mountains that did or did not have a competing species.

36:09Jared Diamond:But my natural experiments were relatively crude. Jim Robinson and Darren are masters of natural experiments. So my book on leaders uses natural experiments to answer questions about political leaders and business leaders and sports coaches. So I admire Darren and Jim a lot. I think that they give less credit to geography and more credit to institutions than I do, but they are great scientists and great writers. Now, your book on environmental collapse, that one seemed too pessimistic to me.

36:45Tyler Cowen:Have you become more optimistic since then? In some ways, yes.

36:49Jared Diamond:I'm more optimistic now than I was 20 years ago. One might say, for heaven's sakes, why? Because now there are more people, we have more destructive power, and there's less time left before we risk going over the cliff. But in the last 20 years, there have been two developments that make me cautiously optimistic. One is what has happened in the world to big businesses. 20 years ago, I would have said that the most evil, destructive forces of the world are big businesses. And it was true that 20 years ago, big businesses, for the most part, were not much interested in the environment. But within the last 20 years, big businesses have been increasingly interested in the environment.

37:35Jared Diamond:Walmart, for example, has taken a lead in sustainable products, or Unilever has taken a lead in sustainable fishery. And even oil companies. I was sent out by World Wildlife Fund in 1999 to do environmental studies in the oil fields that Chevron managed in Papua New Guinea. And I went out expecting that they would be awful. I learned, in fact, that Chevron is and was ultra-cautious in the oil fields because they knew that if they made a mess, New Guineans would sue them. If they made a mess, they would not get contracts for developing the Norwegian oil fields. So one thing that makes me optimistic is that I've learned that at least some big companies care a lot about the environment.

38:23Jared Diamond:The other thing that makes me optimistic is the increased role of young people. 25 years ago, young people were not much interested in the environment. Now they've got a lot interested in the environment. My own sons at age five and six, I remember them and their class at age six marching to make a plea for protecting the rainforest. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I would say the chances are 51 % that we will have a good outcome and only 49 % that we will have a bad outcome. And I'm more optimistic now than I was 20 years ago, particularly for those two reasons. the development of environmental concerns among some big businesses and the much more increased interest of young people in the environment and in our future.

39:09Tyler Cowen:And are you more optimistic about Australia? Won't water desalination just solve their major problems? Water desalination requires energy. But they have solar energy, right? Batteries will get better. Maybe it costs them 2 % of GDP. That's one year's growth. They give up a year's growth and they have all the water they need.

39:27Jared Diamond:We shall see. It has not happened yet. Fortunately, there is development of sustainable forms of energy, particularly wind energy and solar energy, which now account for, what, 10 % or 15 % of energy production in the United States. Nuclear energy, about 85 % or 90 % of the energy in France comes from nuclear energy. There's work on getting energy from tides. there's work on getting energy geothermally from heat in the ground. We shall see.

40:01Tyler Cowen:And what do you think is the single biggest environmental problem at the macro level for the world? Is it climate change? Is it biodiversity? Is it water? Something else?

40:11Jared Diamond:I'm laughing because welcome to why interviewers find interviewing Jared Diamond so frustrating. When they ask me a question, what is the single most important thing? My answer is always, The single most important thing is not to look for the single most important thing because the world is complicated. When a couple who are about to get married ask me, what is the single most important thing for happy marriage? My answer is the single most important thing is not to look for the single most important thing. For a happy marriage, you need to get 37 things right. And if you get 36 things right and you disagree about sex or you disagree about religion, the marriage will fall apart.

40:46Jared Diamond:So to go to your question, what is the most important thing in the world today? There are many things that we have to get right. The most important things that we have to get right are climate change, inequality, and the nuclear risk, the risk that we will have nuclear war and that we will have nuclear winter. So I didn't give you one answer, but I gave you three answers.

41:13Tyler Cowen:Do you have ideas on what we should do to limit nuclear war risk?

41:17Jared Diamond:What should we do to limit nuclear war risk? Conversations? Sure, it's obvious. Conversations between the countries that have nuclear weapons. There have been such conversations. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia and the United States had uninterrupted conversations because Russia and the United States saw how close we had come to, well, not the world. China and the United States have not come that far. But we're at least having conversations. The big danger player today is, of course, North Korea. And our current president has made an effort and now says he's going to make another effort to get conversations going with North Korea.

42:02Jared Diamond:So, in short, my answer to your question, what do we need to avoid a nuclear war?

42:08Tyler Cowen:Conversations among the nine countries that have nuclear weapons. Do you still type using the Dvorak keyboard layout?

42:15Jared Diamond:I'm looking at my wife's computer here, which is the Dvorak keyboard. I would say that we are invested in the Dvorak keyboard. Yes, another keyboard will be much more efficient, but we've got the Dvorak keyboard.

42:29Tyler Cowen:I don't see any movement towards replacing the Dvorak keyboard.

42:44Jared Diamond:Young people learn how to use the Dvorak keyboard. Yes, another keyboard will be more efficient, but they learn the Dvorak keyboard and it works. There are other things that they care about

42:56Tyler Cowen:rather than getting a different keyboard. Where's your favorite place to go birdwatching?

43:00Jared Diamond:My favorite place to go birdwatching is the street where I live in Los Angeles, Stone Canyon Road. My list of species for my street is 189 species. I go birdwatching on my street every Saturday and every Sunday. That's my favorite place to go birdwashing in the United States. But of course, my favorite place to go birdwashing in the world is New Guinea, no close second. New Guinea has the birds of paradise, the world's most beautiful birds. New Guinea has bowerbirds, the animals that build the most complex structures other than us humans. The bower of a bowerbird, a bird this size, about the size of a jade.

43:37Jared Diamond:A male builds a bower that may be nine feet tall and is decorated with hundreds of blue fruits and red flowers and orange mushrooms. It has dozens and dozens of pounds of stuff, of shells, of pandanus leaves. Once we've been to New Guinea, the rest of the world is boring. That's the only disadvantage of being in New Guinea.

44:02Tyler Cowen:Panama, Costa Rica, Santa Marta, Colombia. Are they worth going to for birds? they're worth going to with their second to New Guinea. Now, you've written quite a fair number of books that one could call big picture or big idea books. In terms of your method, how does each one come about? An idea comes to you in the shower, or you start writing out many ideas and you abandon most of them? Or what would you say is your method for a thing that you do and very few people have done in the quantity that you've done it?

44:32Jared Diamond:I'm interested in lots of things. I'm interested in languages, genetics, human evolution. It means that until the 1980s, I was the world's expert on the gallbladder. And then my twin sons were born in the year 1987. I realized that the future of my twin sons was not going to depend upon gallbladders. It was going to depend upon history and geography. But there were many major questions in history and geography. My first book, The Third Chimpanzee, had chapters on things that then ended up in other books. One chapter of my book, The Third Chimpanzee, my book from 1991, got expanded into Guns, Journals of Steel.

45:12Jared Diamond:Another chapter of my book, The Third Chimpanzee, got expanded into Collapsed. Still another chapter got expanded into Why is sex fun. My current book about leaders is a subject that has interested me for a long time as a result of being born in 1937 and growing up in the shadow of Hitler and then wondering whether World War II and the Holocaust would have achieved the form that they did if it hadn't been for Hitler.

45:40Tyler Cowen:What's your most unusual successful work habit? You get a lot done, right? You're extremely productive in multiple areas. Do I have a single unusual work habit?

45:49Jared Diamond:Once again, And welcome to Jared Don. No, I don't have one work habit. My work habits are that I'm comfortable sitting down at a desk and working at the desk. I've learned to take off time in the evening instead of working on my book in the evening. In the evening now, I listen to music. The composer Johann Sebastian Bach, I sang. I played the piano. I played the organ. I played the viola. Bach wrote 200 cantatas. and I've been telling myself, I would like to get to know all the Bach cantatas. A year and a half ago, I found the time has arrived. I'm now going to listen to Bach cantatas at the rate of one per week.

46:28Jared Diamond:I'm now up to cantata number 57, but it means that in the evening, I'm relaxed and I'm not fretting. I'm not wasting my time getting anxious. I'm instead listening to Bach cantatas so I get good sleep.

46:44Tyler Cowen:Are you listening to the Suzuki recordings or the Horn and Court, or which ones? Gardner? I have three recording them.

46:51Jared Diamond:Gardner is one. Another is, you know, although I listen to them every night, I can tell you Gardner, but I can't tell you the names of the other Bach and Todd recordings that I listen to every night. I just listen to them.

47:05Tyler Cowen:We once had Suzuki on as a guest. He was great. Your father, Louis Diamond, he was a great benefactor, right, in hematology. How did that shape your life?

47:14Jared Diamond:my father and my mother, they were different people. Dad was a hematologist and a pediatrician, a children's doctor. The result was that growing up, whenever people ask me, what do you want to do when you grow up? My answer was, I want to be a doctor like my father. Well, dad also did scientific research. And so when I went to college, initially I was pre-manned. I thought I would be a doctor like my father. But then I realized that what really interests me is science, including medical science. And so I went into physiology, which is a medical science. So dad shaped my career in that direction.

47:57Jared Diamond:My mother was a linguist and a teacher. Mom taught me to read when I was three years old. And when I started learning languages in school, and my first language was Latin. It was my first foreign language. I didn't realize that you had to learn grammar. So I just memorized the vocabulary. And after a month, I was way out of shape with Latin because I hadn't learned the grammar. My mother then sat every night for a year. Mom sat down with me and we went through my Latin lessons. From mom, I developed my love of languages. Mom was a concert pianist, so I developed my love of music. So I gained different things from mom, languages and music particularly, and from my father, science.

48:41Tyler Cowen:Do you think your own shift away from studying the gallbladder shaped the lives of your children?

48:46Jared Diamond:Yes. Not because I taught them not to study gallbladders, but because the birth of my children made me realize that I better do something more important for the world than studying gallbladder. I'm an optimistic person. I don't get depressed, usually. The one time in my life that I was depressed for a week was when I learned that I was awarded one of these MacArthur Fellowships, the so-called Genius Awards. When I got the MacArthur Fellowship, I thought I would have been excited to have it. Instead, I was depressed for a week. Why? Because the news of the MacArthur Fellowship told me, Jared, people expect big things of you, and you haven't delivered.

49:27Jared Diamond:You've been working on the gallbladder. You can do better things than that. And on top of that, my sons, their future is not going to depend upon gallbladders. It's dependent upon history and geography. So the combination of the birth of my sons and the McAuliffe Fellowship caused me to switch from medical physiology into writing books on big subjects, such as why you and I are now speaking English rather than speaking Don Waddle.

49:54Tyler Cowen:Before my last question, let me just plug your book again. It is called Prophets, P-R-O-F-I-T-S, Prophets, P-R-O-P-H-E-T-S, Coaches, and Kings, in parentheses, when do leaders matter? So that's Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, when do leaders matter? Final question. Other than Bach Cantatas, what is it you hope to learn about next?

50:19Jared Diamond:I'll be 89 years old next month, and statistically, so maybe over a decade ahead of me. I have two goals on the next decade. One is to get to know all those 200 Bach cantatas. I'm only up to number 57 last night. And the other thing is that I've been working in New Guinea for 60 years. I personally explored all of the 10 outlying mountain ranges of New Guinea. For some of them, I'm the only person who explored them, but I haven't synthesized what I've learned. I want to compare the bird faunas of those 10 mountains of New Guinea to understand why some birds are better colonists than other birds.

50:59Jared Diamond:But New Guinea birds, the questions that one can ask about New Guinea birds are broad questions one can ask about other animals. But birds are the easiest of all animals to observe. So the other thing that I want to do with my remaining decade, besides listening to Bach and Tartas, is to synthesize my work on New Guinea birds and to publish an account of why some New Guinea birds have colonized every one of those outlying New Guinea mountains, while other New Guinea birds have colonized none of them. Those are my two main intellectual goals. But then my biggest goal, of course, is to continue to contribute to the happiness of my life and children.

51:39Tyler Cowen:Jared Diamond, thank you very much. Thank you very much. You are really interested to do an interview with. Thanks.

51:50Tyler Cowen:Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.