What Makes Great Leaders & How to Live an Extraordinary Life | Dr. Jared Diamond

What happened in this episode?

Andrew Huberman interviews author and UCLA professor emeritus Jared Diamond about his book on leadership, which compares political, business, sports and religious leaders. Diamond discusses how historians argue over whether individuals change history, using Adolf Hitler as an example, and explains that his own approach relies on “natural experiments” rather than biography alone. He offers several generalisations he says emerged from his research, including a claim that only two of 22 major postwar political leaders in his sample stepped down voluntarily.

The conversation moves through religious leadership, including Diamond’s view that Jesus benefited from timing and the later organisational role of St Paul, and a discussion of cult leadership in which Diamond says Jim Jones initially attracted followers through idealistic goals and claims Jones helped desegregate Indianapolis before the People’s Temple ended in the Jonestown mass deaths.

Diamond also explains why sports provide unusually rich datasets for studying leadership effects, citing analysis-of-variance findings he says attribute a minority share of team outcomes to coaches, with large roles for players and institutions. In a related aside, he alleges UCLA’s athletics department is heavily indebted due to costly coaching contract buyouts.

Away from leadership, Diamond describes his lifelong habit of making lists, his language learning, and his fieldwork in New Guinea, arguing that birds are an accessible model system for understanding behaviour and communication. He also defends the late Paul Ehrlich’s warnings on population and environmental stress, reframing the issue as population multiplied by consumption.

What are the key points?

• Diamond says Jim Jones should not be dismissed as simply “crazy”, claiming he once led desegregation efforts in Indianapolis before Jonestown.
• Diamond claims that, among 22 major postwar political leaders he assessed, only Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew stepped down voluntarily.
• He cites analysis-of-variance results he says attribute roughly 15–30% of sports success variance to coaches, with additional shares to players and institutions.
• Diamond alleges UCLA athletics is about $150m in debt, attributing it to repeated coach firings and contract buyouts since John Wooden.
• He argues Paul Ehrlich’s population warnings were broadly correct when framed as population growth multiplied by per-person consumption.

Who is speaking?

Named speakers identified in Egleze's source-linked moments from this episode.

• Dr. Jared Diamond

Which topics are covered?

How is this page sourced?

Programme

Huberman Lab

Duration

1h 53m

Original episode

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