World-Renowned Historian: When Leaders Actually Change History | Jared Diamond - EP 815

26:08Jared, on Passion Struck, the show, we often explore the tension between circumstance and choice. And reading your book, I was wondering whether that's really what you're studying here. Do great leaders create history or do they recognize opportunities that history presents? What are your thoughts on that?

26:31Jared Diamond:Two of those things that you say are correct, and I would add a third thing to them. Do leaders create opportunities or do opportunities fall into their laps? I divide leaders with that respect into three categories. There are leaders who recognize that the time and place are right and they then seize the opportunity. Charles de Gaulle, French president Charles de Gaulle, became president of France just after World War II. He then realized that the French governmental system was not suitable for doing what he wanted. And so he resigned the presidency, but he remained in contact with French politicians.

27:14Jared Diamond:And in 1958, at the time of the Algerian War, De Gaulle recognized that the time was right, and then he engineered his comeback. So there are leaders who engineer the opportunities. There are other leaders who recognize that the time and place is right, but they cannot engineer the opportunities. Winston Churchill, when he became Prime Minister of England at the outbreak of World War II in Europe in May 1940, Winston Churchill could not create World War II, but when World War II happened, he recognized this was the moment for which my whole life was preparing me, and he used those words. And then the third situation, so there are people who create the opportunity.

27:58Jared Diamond:There are people like Winston Churchill who couldn't create the opportunity but recognize that this was their time. And then finally there are people who don't realize that this is the right time. In modern times, Mark Zuckerberg. It's not that Mark Zuckerberg created the right time when he was sophomore at all. It happened. He didn't know it until retrospect. Genghis Khan, the biggest conqueror in world history, who founded the biggest empire from China all the way to Poland. Why did Genghis Khan fan such a huge empire? We didn't know until about a decade ago. Dendrokinologists studying tree rings in Mongolia looked at these tree rings for the last 2 ,000 years, and they discovered that the wettest time in the last 2 ,000 years in Mongolia was around the time of Genghis Khan's birth.

28:50Jared Diamond:But Genghis Khan, the Mongols needed wet conditions to provide the hay for the sheep and goats on which they fed, and they needed the wet conditions to feed the horses that they rode into battle. Genghis Khan didn't know that he happened to be born precisely at the right time in the last 2000 years. No way he could have known that. We didn't realize it until recently. So in short, some leaders create the opportunities, some leaders have the opportunities handed to them and they recognize it. And finally, some leaders like Angus Khan have the opportunities to hand it to them, but they don't recognize it.

29:29You said earlier that you grew up around World War II. And given when you grew up, Hitler would have been a huge person whose history, not that it isn't today, but even more so then, would have been discussed. Why did you choose to open up the book talking about him and that car crash in 1930 that almost took his life?

29:58Jared Diamond:The first paragraph of my book is about a car crash in 1930 where Hitler's chauffeur-driven car was coming into an intersection and a big truck came into the intersection at right angles to Hitler's truck. Hitler's chauffeur-driven car, if the truck had collided with Hitler being in the right side and the truck coming in from him, Hitler would have been dead. If Hitler had died in 1930, would there have been the Holocaust? There might well have been a World War II because of the tree of Versailles, etc., etc. But the war that took place under Hitler was a distinctive war. Yes, there was anti-Semitism, but industrial scale killing of 6 million people, was that a contribution of Hitler?

30:47Jared Diamond:Other German leaders might have achieved their goals without war. So that was a good way with which to begin. Growing up during World War II, Hitler was constantly on our minds. And then after the war, because the last of my family in Europe died in the Holocaust, and my wife's family died or survived Auschwitz, I then moved to Germany. And I lived in Germany. I tried to understand why it happened there. Could it have happened in another country? But after I lived in Germany, I lived in Chile, where there was a dictator, Pinochet, whose tortures were worse than those of Hitler, although he didn't get the body count.

31:32Jared Diamond:And then I've worked for 30 years in Indonesia during the years of Suhata, who killed 2 million Indonesians. So there are other people besides Hitler. Could have happened in other countries. It did happen in other countries in Germany, but not on an industrial scale. But on top of that, I love German music. Some of my dearest friends are Germans. my German friends, they were the ones who suffered during World War II. They got orphaned, they lost their brother, they were separated from their father from 11 years, they spent five years sleeping under a bridge because of the bombers. So all those reasons why I began my book with Hitler.

32:13Well, Jared, I want to jump from Hitler to President Truman, because you cover both in the book. And one of the things that struck me about both is if you would have looked earlier in history, neither one would have been people that you would have thought could rise up to do what either of them ended up doing. If history couldn't reliably identify either man before their moment arrived. Do you think that means that people with the greatest potential to shape our future could be individuals we're overlooking today?

32:55Jared Diamond:Yes, to my surprise. President Truman, everybody recognized that President B. Truman, had a completely undistinguished life even when he became vice president. Roosevelt didn't even bother to bring Truman into meetings. Truman had gotten to be a judge and then a senator in various illicit ways. So nobody expected Truman to be a distinguished president. And yet when he became president, he was confronted with problems, big problems, how to end the war, to use or not to use the atomic bomb, what to do about the Berlin airlift, what to do about Russia acquiring the hydrogen bomb. He made these decisions courageously.

33:40Jared Diamond:He was disliked, scorned for them. Most of all, he was scorned for firing General MacArthur, although in retrospect, it's now considered that was the right decision. So Truman was someone who became an outstanding president without any foreshadowing. And in the case of Hitler, I assume that Hitler was obvious when he was, no, it wasn't obvious. Hitler himself said the first speech that he gave was when he was 30 years old. And the people who had served with him when he was in the German army during World War I said he was an undistinguished person, a quiet person. We didn't expect him to be a leader.

34:20A conclusion is that it's difficult to recognize whether there are other people who might have done it.

34:27Jared Diamond:And yet in my book, I think I've identified a number of cases, Siretsi Kama, the first president of Botswana, Linda Resnick, who founded industrial scale pomegranate juice, where we can say nobody else could have done it. In the case of Saretsi Kama, the founding president of Botswana, there were only 22 college graduates in Botswana when Botswana became independent. And Saretsi Kama, he was chief of the biggest tribe. He was the only one who could take away powers from the chiefs. And it was on his land that diamonds were found that became the wealth of Botswana. He was the only one who could say the diamonds belong not to my tribe, but to the nation of Botswana.

35:10Jared Diamond:So as a contrast case to Truman and to Hitler, I think that Sretzikam and a few others are people who really made a difference and nobody else could have done it. After looking at the three people we've just covered, so we have three political leaders across different countries, cultures, etc. Were there patterns across all of them that genuinely surprised you that you didn't expect? I'm laughing because in chapter three in my book, I have a table of Maedler political leaders, since we're about 22 of them. And when I looked at them, the thing that surprised me that I hadn't expected, I hadn't even asked the question, was that of these 22 leaders, there were only two who stepped down from power voluntarily.

36:02One was Nelson Mandela and then Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

36:06Jared Diamond:But the other 20 leaders, they didn't step down voluntarily. Some of them got assassinated. One of them committed suicide. Some died of heart attacks. Some got voted out of office. In other words, once a person becomes a major political leader, they conclude that they are well qualified to do it. And in the vast majority of cases, they don't step down voluntarily. That was the biggest surprise for me. So to now go to something that you call the Hamlet test, and I want to use Harry S. Truman as kind of the test here. Do you think if he wasn't the one who stepped up when he did, do you think there was anyone else living at the same time in the U.S.

36:55leadership who could have achieved something similar to him? And the second part of this is, why is Shakespeare the perfect model for evaluating this question?

37:08Jared Diamond:Let's take your first question. Could anyone other than Harry Truman have done it? I think that 95 other people could have done it. Namely, there were 96 senators, and most of those senators were more distinguished and more experienced than Harry Truman. Whether they would have had the courage of Truman, we don't know, but at least the experience and qualifications, yes. As for Shakespeare and what I call the Hamlet test, this question that you're asking, could anyone else have done it? Is there one person who was uniquely qualified? In most cases, I think there are lots of other people. Bill Gates, okay.

37:51Jared Diamond:How many million computer nerds were there in the United States? Bill Gates was a very able person, but there were other able people. But in a few cases, one can say he was the only person who could have done it. So Hamlet, which was often regarded as the greatest play in the English language, could someone else other than Shakespeare have written Hamlet? Well, to write Hamlet, you had to have a theatre company, you had to have experience, and you had to have written previous plays. Hamlet was not Shakespeare's first play. He'd already written Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar and other good plays.

38:23Jared Diamond:He had proven that he was an outstanding dramatist before he came to write Hamlet. We know who were the other Elizabethan dramatists at the time. There are about 20 of them. We've got their plays, Ben Johnson, Marlowe, etc. And their plays, some of them are good plays, but they're not remotely as good as Hamlet. And so we can name all the other people who might have written major plays because they had to be dramatists in Elizabethan theatre. and none of them wrote plays remotely as good as Hamlet. So we can say that Shakespeare was uniquely qualified to write Hamlet. In the world of politics, I mentioned that Sretzi Kama was uniquely qualified to be the founding president.

39:04Jared Diamond:But Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, yes, they're very able people, but one cannot say that there are only 33 other individuals among 350 million Americans of who could have done what Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did. It's rare that you can identify leaders by the Hamlet test, but sometimes it's possible. I want to talk about Jimmy Carter for a second, and I'm going to bring him up for this reason. One of your strongest conclusions that I found is that founders matter disproportionately because they create the rules, the culture, and the institutions that everyone else inherits.

39:43So it made me wonder, should we judge great leaders less by what they accomplish while they're in office and more by what continues after they leave? And I'm bringing Jimmy Carter up because if you would have looked at him just through his presidency, it tells one story. But if you look at his legacy following his time in office, it tells a completely different story.

40:08Jared Diamond:That's a very good point. I hadn't thought of it in that way, but it is the case. People often ask me, Jared, why in your book do you not discuss Angela Merkel or Donald Trump? And I said in my book that I don't discuss standing leaders, refuse to discuss standing leaders today or leaders who stepped down recently because we can't judge the outcome. In the case of Angela Merkel, views about her have changed notably within the last few years. And so I avoided discussing standing leaders. In the case of Jimmy Carter, that's an interesting point that you raise. Leaders need to be judged after their term in office has ended and one can see what the outcome is.

40:57Jared Diamond:And that outcome includes what people have done following them. For example, when Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore, when he stepped down, Singapore has continued to be a very successful, very honest country because of the institution that he set up. Similarly, George Washington. So George Washington died, what, 250 years ago? Right. But the institutions to which he contributed, and George Washington made the decision, as president, he would only serve two terms. that precedent continued until Roosevelt. And when Roosevelt broke that precedent, then the constitution was amended to go back to what George Washington set up.

41:40Jared Diamond:So in short, your point is correct that leaders have to be judged not only by what happened when they were in office, but also by what happened after they were in office. It was just an interesting, I went to the Naval Academy, so he's one of our most famous graduates. And it just got me wondering because another thing you introduced was the idea of discretion, meaning the amount of freedom a leader actually has to shape events. And I grew up in a home where my dad had this beloved image of Churchill in this black and white image of him in a prominent place in our house, my entire upbringing. And Churchill in wartime had enormous discretion.

42:27But what we see in Churchill in peacetime is that he had far less. And the reason I think Carter is an interesting example here is Carter is like the exact opposite. In these moments when he should, He probably should have had less ability to shape events. He actually shaped world events in a huge way. So it was just an interesting thing for me as I was thinking through it. Right.

42:55Jared Diamond:That's a good point. And here are two more examples of what you're thinking of. The first chancellor of Germany after World War II was Konrad Adenauer. And he was regarded as a very effective chancellor who established democratic government in Germany. when Germany had not had democratic government, and he maintained good relationships with potential allies of Germany. Konrad Adenau has then been followed by an unbroken succession of effective chancellors in Germany. He established institutions, and he established an example that subsequent German chancellors have lived up to. The point that you make about Churchill is correct, namely that particular people can be effective at particular times and places.

43:48Jared Diamond:Churchill was a great wartime prime minister. He was undistinguished as a peacetime prime minister, so much so that in his last term as peacetime prime minister, his colleagues were doing whatever they could to get him out of office, partly because he was older, but also because he was well-matched to a wartime job and was not well-matched to a peacetime job. So this makes the point that the circumstances are important. A leader may be good under some circumstances, but that same person, not under others. Siretsi Kama, founding president of Botswana, if he had been founding president of Somalia, we would never hear of Siretsi Kama because there's not much that you can do with Somalia.

44:31Jared Diamond:There were things you could do with Botswana. Jared, up until this point, we've been talking a lot about presidents and heads of state. But one thing I appreciated about your book is that you don't believe leadership principles stop at politics. You ask the same exact questions of business leaders. Can someone like Jeff Bezos shape history in the same way a president can? Or does business leadership work differently? business leadership in some cases a business leader is uniquely qualified as with shakespeare an example so pomegranate juice pomegranate juice it's not as important as computers but more or less it's a good example there was no pomegranate juice pomegranates have been around for 4 000 years and people in middle eastern markets squeeze juice out of them but they squeeze it one by one.

45:23Jared Diamond:It's difficult to do anything with pomegranates. And there was not, most Americans didn't know about pomegranate, but there's a couple in Los Angeles, and I know them. They bought agricultural land and on their agricultural land, they bought some land for almonds and on the land were 110 pomegranate bushes. They were going to pull them out, but then they heard that pomegranates, you can sell them for Thanksgiving, put them on Thanksgiving table. And then they heard that pomegranates have health benefits. So they got seriously interested in this. And they then became the biggest pomegranate growers in the United States.

46:04Jared Diamond:The other 20 pomegranate growers, all in California, they were small growers. They didn't have much of the market. They didn't have much money. They couldn't develop a pomegranate business and they weren't interested in developing a pomegranate business. But the Resnicks did. they put huge amounts of money into it, maybe$200 million. They've not made much money at pomegranates, but they founded the pomegranate juice industry. So lots of us now drink pomegranate juice. And there's now a section in supermarkets of super premium juices, which includes pomegranates and very other juices. They were uniquely qualified to do that.

46:39Jared Diamond:And now I've gotten so involved with them that I've, please bring me back to a question. Oh, well, so if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the Resnecks who help bring pomegranates to the world, correct? So if they pass the Hamlet test through their combination of what I'm hearing is vision, patience, branding, and execution were genuinely unique, then therefore that becomes kind of the benchmark, which then brings me back to the obvious question. Why doesn't Jeff Bezos passed the same test? Jeff Bezos passes another test. Jeff Bezos does not pass the Hamlet test because, all right, so Jeff Bezos set up an everything store.

47:24Jared Diamond:He had the idea of selling everything and he set it up online. But there were other people who had the idea and set up everything businesses. eBay already existed before Jeff Bezos. eBay was an everything, Everything is in everything business, but in a different way from Jeff Bezos. Namely, other people put their stuff in line. And then Walmart, which was a successful retailer, Walmart then set up an everything business, but they did it not online. They did it with brick and mortar stores. Jeff Bezos set up an everything store, but he did it in a distinctive way. Namely, he did it online. Was he the only person who could have done it?

48:05Jared Diamond:Probably not because he set up Amazon at a time when the internet was exploding by a factor of 4 ,000 each year. Other people would notice it. So if Jeff Bezos, and we know that other people set up everything stores, and there might have been hundreds of thousands of other people who would have set up an online everything store. But he never was. He did it in a distinct way. He did it online, not brick and mortar, and not in the eBay style. So that's an example of someone who made a difference in the way that he did something that other people… Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg. There were social media before Mark Zuckerberg.

48:46Jared Diamond:There are lots of other social media today. But Mark Zuckerberg set up his social media in a distinctive way that included a like button that stimulated some extreme points of view. and Gavin Peel. So Mark Zuckerberg did not create social media. There were lots of other people who created social media, but he created a social media medium in a distinctive way, all of which can be summed up by saying that there are some people who passed the Hamlet test. Nobody else could have done anything. There are other people who don't pass the Hamlet test, but they did things in a distinctive way that other people would have done or did do in other ways.

49:25It's interesting. I've never met Jeff Bezos. I've known a lot of people who work directly under him who have had the chance to ask questions and get some insight. But thinking about where we've been going in the arc of this discussion, it's making me wonder, the greatest leaders don't necessarily invent the future, but they shape its character. And when I think about Bezos, one of the things that I think was really unique that he did is he embedded a philosophy into Amazon of long-term thinking and customer obsession right into its DNA. And so he's building these tangencies, like getting into books, to get audience.

50:11But he always knew there was something bigger than the audience. He was always concerned because he knew longer term that the data was the most important thing. Because when I think of Amazon, they're really a data company. And these different avenues that they have to serve customers are really the entry point. It's like the operating system from the different business lines are really the distribution channels. But at its core, they're really focused on data algorithms and then making choices and just long-term decisions to benefit the business based on those analytics. Is that kind of a way to think about this?

50:53Jared Diamond:Yes, it is a way to think about this. There are other people who don't fit exactly the Jeff Bezos model, but they're distinctive. They put their stamp on industries just as Jeff Bezos in other ways. For example, Steve Jobs. All right. There are other people. There were and there still are other cell phones and there have been other tablet computers. But Steve Jobs, he was with Apple among the found. He was fired. Apple then went downhill. He was brought back. So we know that he made a difference because he saved Apple. Steve Jobs had a distinctive style. Instead of putting out lots of products, he said, we'll focus just on four or five products.

51:41Jared Diamond:Okay, that's a decision. He also cared a lot about external appearance. He cared a lot about ease of customer use. The contrast case, our television set, to turn on our television set, my wife and I, we've got this 47-button remote. We can't. When I tried to watch The Word of the Cup, I had to call my son Joshua. What do I do with these 47 buttons? Steve Jobs wouldn't tolerate it. Steve Jobs had really, really user-friendly devices. So he put his distinctive stamp. Elon Musk also put his distinctive stamp in line after line, not only electric cars, but rockets, etc. Elon Musk, I've met Elon Musk.

52:26Jared Diamond:Steve Jobs I did not meet. I did meet Jeff Bezos once. I met Bill Gates. Elon Musk is a very distinctive person. And in his various lines, e-cars and rockets, his style includes make it, simplify the line, fewer people. Other people, Jeff Bezos now has his own private rockets. But Elon Musk took a different approach and so forth, it's a little more successful. approach to having private rockets. And one of my favorite parts of the book was what happens when a CEO dies, becomes ill, et cetera. And I lived through this in two different experiences, one firsthand and the other was a separate experience that I had firsthand, but I wasn't as in the middle of the company, so to speak.

53:20So the first one was when I was at Lowe's, When I first got there, our CEO was a gentleman by the last name Tillman, who grew up within Lowe's, was more of an operator. People cherished him, but he was extremely demanding. And then during most of my time there, Robert Niblock replaced him and Robert came from a completely different pedigree. He was the CFO. He was much more gentler, much more analytic, didn't have necessarily nearly as much a pulse on the customer as Tillman did. And you saw a major change start to happen in how the customer was valued between the two. And then my other experiences, I'm going to go back to Microsoft, because when I met Bill Gates the second time, I was being interviewed to be a senior executive there, a C-level executive, while Steve Ballmer was still the CEO.

54:17And it's interesting because the two interviews I had back-to-back were I first met with Bill Gates, who was trying to convince me during our interview, and this was a time that I met him one-on-one, how good the culture was. And then my next interview was with Satya Nadella, who in the next interview was telling me how bad the culture is, but don't give up on coming there because he thinks it could be great again in the future. And this was a few years before he even got the opportunity to do it. But it's interesting because Because after Gates left, in many ways, you could say Microsoft in some ways lost its way.

55:00And then under Nadella has had a complete rebirth in a different way of getting back to its core roots. And so I thought they were two different experiences that I've had that show how much this matters when you have a person who leaves their post and another person takes over.

55:22Jared Diamond:that's very interesting how the same company performs under leaders with different styles it's also interesting because one of the natural experiments that people in the business world in the laboratory you put a gallbladder here you put a gallbladder that you can manipulate it in the business world you can't manipulate leaders but leaders get manipulated and they manipulate themselves. Leaders move from one company to another company. And similarly, sports coaches frequently get fired and then move to another team. In Argentina, something like 400 coaches get fired. And so one has the natural experiment of seeing how the same leader does with different companies.

56:09Jared Diamond:Therefore, one has a basis for judging the quality of leader independent of the quality of the company. If a company is doing very well, there may be four reasons. It might be it's a good time in the business world in general. It might be that it's a strong industry. It might be that it's a well-run company like Brock and Gamble. Or it might be that it's a successful CEO. You can sort out the contributions by seeing what happens when a CEO changes in a company or when a CEO moves from one company to another company. If the same CEO has success in many different companies, that gives you reason to believe that that CEO contributed.

56:49Jared Diamond:And with experiments of that sort, the conclusion that business schools, professors or students have come to is that of those four factors, the smallest factor is the year. Yes, one thinks they're a depression, but in fact, the year accounts for only something like 3 % of company earnings on the average. The CEO accounts for between 10 % and 30 % of company earnings. The particular business, like Procter & Gamble, accounts for another 15 % or 20%. There are some industries that are very profitable, and there are some industries that are unprofitable. So the experiment that you mentioned of a leader changing or moving from one company to another, that's the natural experiment that business school professors use to try to sort out the roles of league.

57:42Jared Diamond:And similarly in the sports world, the way that the affixionators of sports figure out whether Bill Belichick really made a difference. See what happens when Bill Belichick moves to another team or when Tom Brady leaves the New England Patriots. Those are natural experiments. Well, that one, depending on how you look at it, sure proved the value of Tom Brady, given he was able to go to another team and take them immediately to a championship. And then you saw the other team slowly, well, not slowly, quickly demise when he left. And it's interesting because I've had the opportunity to both interview and just have casual conversations with people who played with Tom Brady.

58:29And what they tell me again and again is Tom could become the coach of a high school team that has finished 0-10 for the last six years. And in a matter of a year or two, they'd be the state champion. They just all tell me he had such not only a work ethic, but a way of bringing his teammates up through example that made him just a superior teammate to play with. So I love that example that you brought up. And since we're on the topic of coaches, I can't leave this discussion without talking about John Wooden. And it's interesting. I just did a solo episode and I didn't talk about John's championships in my solo episode.

59:15I talked about how the first thing he does before he does anything at the start of a season is he would take his players through an exercise of teaching them how to put on their socks the right way. Right. And I love that story because when you hear from people who played underneath him, rarely do those players ever talk about the championships that they won. They almost universally talk about the person that he helped them become. And my question for you, Jared, is do you think that's the highest form of leadership, not changing outcomes, but changing human beings?

59:54Jared Diamond:That's a value question. There are people who might say that's the highest form of leadership. If one instead asks, what is the legacy of a leader? Leaders who, John Wooden did change human beings. Conrad Adenauer, one doesn't hear about Conrad Adenauer changing human beings, but he certainly set up institutions. Charles de Gaulle certainly did not change human beings, but he set up powerful institutions, and he dealt with very difficult situations. So in answer to your question, I would say that's a value question. There are people who might place value on leaders who change human beings. There are other people who would say, so he or she didn't change human beings, but he or she made a big difference.

1:00:46Well, towards the end of the chapter, you make what I think is one of the most profound observations in the entire book. You argue that Wooden's uniqueness wasn't his drills or his discipline. It was that every aspect of his coaching flowed from a coherent philosophy of life. And so my question is, have we become too focused on teaching leadership techniques and not focused enough on helping leaders develop a philosophy that's worth following in the first place?

1:01:15Jared Diamond:Undoubtedly, yes. I've not been to business school, but my understanding is that business school is about teaching techniques. But you don't go to business school in order to be told that you should be a wonderful, admirable human being. You don't pay$50 ,000 a year to get that message. Leaders who have been wonderful, admirable human beings and have been successful as leaders. There are leaders who have been very successful as leaders, but who have not been admirable human beings. I've not heard anyone say that Elon Musk is an admirable human being, but he's been very successful. and Suharto, dictator of Indonesia.

1:02:03Jared Diamond:Suharto inherited a difficult situation. He dealt with the situation first by killing two million Indonesians, but then he established stability for a country that was on the verge of falling apart. Nobody today would say that Suharto's legacy was that he served as a model of being an admirable human being. but he made a difference for Indonesia. Jared, I did want to ask this question. I know you don't talk about current leaders, so I'm going to phrase this differently. As you look through history and leaders you've studied, have you found another time period where we had the leadership type of paradigm that we have now between the leader of Russia, the leader of China, and the president of the United States in a different time period and things that we need to be aware of, looking at history to project what could be hopeful about the future and what we need to be concerned about with the future.

1:03:09Jared Diamond:There have been time periods, including recent time periods. First of all, a situation today when you mentioned Putin and the United States, Russia is a dictatorship today. There is concern about the United States ceasing to be a democracy. There are many examples of democracies that have ceased to be democracies. And I lived in Chile. When I lived in Chile, Chile was the most successful democracy in Latin America. The Chileans, when I was there, said Chile is not a South American country. It's a European country that happens to be geographically in South America. It's the most successful democracy in South America.

1:03:55Jared Diamond:And yet in 1973, Chile became the most evil dictatorship in South America. In response to your question, in the period between World War I and World War II, there were numerous democracies that became dictatorships. Italy was a democracy, and under Mussolini it became a dictatorship. Hitler, Germany, was a democracy, and under Hitler it became a dictatorship. Poland had been a democracy. Poland became a dictatorship. England remained a democracy. The United States remained a democracy. There are risks to democracies. There have been risks to democracies in the past. There are risks to democracies at present.

1:04:47Jared Diamond:What's going to happen at present? We don't know. All we can say is that there are democracies that have failed in the past, and we shall see whether democracies today fail. Two last questions to close us out. If there's one lesson today that leaders should take from your research, what do you hope it is? my answer to that question will illustrate why interviewers regularly get frustrated with interviewing jared diamond because whenever i'm asked a question what is the one thing my answer is always there are 37 things you and me both you and me both if someone if a couple who about to get married ask what's the secret of a successful marriage i know that couple is at risk getting divorced because to have a successful marriage you've got to get 37 things right you have to agree about sex and money and children and religion.

1:05:44Jared Diamond:And if you think that one thing is most important, your marriage is going to end up in disaster. Similarly, for a leader, if a leader asks, what is the one most important thing? I would say the one most important thing is to stop looking for the one most important thing, to focus on getting 37 things right. Okay. And then Jared, lastly, I found myself as I was preparing, looking back across your body of work. Guns, germs, and steel, as I think about it, asked how geography and environment shaped the destiny of civilization. Collapse explored whether societies can choose a different future. Upheaval examined how nations reinvent themselves during the crisis.

1:06:27And this latest book asks under what conditions I felt an individual can change history or change lives. And looking back across those books, and hopefully I've summarized them correctly, was this always an intellectual journey you were consciously pursuing? Or did you only recognize that thread in hindsight? You mentioned you were following deep questions that you were exploring.

1:06:52Jared Diamond:The sequence of my books was not an intellectual journey that I planned out. Instead, I've always been interested in lots of things. My mother taught me to read when I was three years old. And when I was three, I started keeping a notebook. And in the notebook, I had a list of rivers, and I had a list of animals. I've always been interested in lots of things. When I wrote my first book, The Third Chimpanzee, about human evolution, at that time, in that book, was a chapter about collapses of societies. And in that book was also a chapter about why you and I are speaking English rather than speaking Nahuatl or speaking Quechua.

1:07:27Jared Diamond:The germs of later books were in my first book. and when I finished one book after finishing one book I then often fumbled around for what would be the next book after I finished my book Collapse I thought I would like to write a book about the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and so I asked advice and the advice that I was given was that Jared a very good book about the cantatas of Bach might sell at most 50 ,000 copies if you want to have a bigger market find something else so I found something else after upheaval leadership was what next came to mind. But after collapse, Bach and Tardis came to mind before I finally settled on the world until yesterday.

1:08:11Jared Diamond:So people often ask me, is there a thread? And no, there's not a thread. There are many different things that I'm interested in. Jared, it was such an honor to have you. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to interview you and for bringing this fantastic book into the world. Thank you. Great pleasure talking with you. Thank you. I hope today's conversation with Jared Diamond gave you a different way to think about leadership. One thing that stayed with me is that we often look back at great leaders and assume that potential must have been obvious from the beginning. But as Jared shows us, sometimes we simply don't know what someone is capable of until the moment demands it.

1:08:51Circumstances matter. The challenges we face matter. And sometimes the situation we're in reveals strengths we didn't even know we possessed. If today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. Share it with me on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you know someone navigating a difficult leadership moment right now, send them this episode. If you haven't already, make sure you're following PassionStruck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our YouTube channels so you never miss what's coming next. because next Tuesday, I am joined by one of the most influential psychologists of our time, Dr.

1:09:31Martin Slugman. Marty is the founder of Positive Psychology and has spent more than 60 years studying one of the most important questions in human flourishing. What gives us the belief that we can shape our own future? His remarkable new book, agency, a psychological history of human progress, traces the journey from learned helplessness to what he now sees as one of the most powerful forces in human life. The belief that tomorrow can be better than today, and that we have the ability to help make it so. And I think that conversation builds perfectly on what Jared and I explored today. Because Jared asks, what happens when the moment calls someone to lead.

1:10:15Marty asks an equally important question. What makes someone believe they can? I think you're going to love this conversation. Individual action

1:10:24Jared Diamond:is where things start, but whether or not it modifies the world, that is you have mastery and agency, or it falls flat and you're helpless and you're non-agentic is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing. And in general, the more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have. Until then, remember, you may not always know what you're capable of until life asks more of you than you thought you could give. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.