Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

It's a little bit off topic here.

Another one is Guns, Terms, and Steel, which won him the Pulitzer Prize.

But I found that when I read that, I was like utterly unconvinced by how strong his argument was.

You know, he basically posits that geography kind of determines destiny to a large extent.

And to me, it's much more nuanced and complicated than that.

And he, you know, he's a geographer and kind of like every, you know, that's your only, if the hammer is your only tool, then everything looks like a nail.

And that's the kind of thing that he does in that book, Guns, Terms and Steel, where he just tries to explain everything in the world with just this one thing, geography.

And it's a bit more complicated than that.

The Treaty of Versailles and hyperinflation had already created the conditions for catastrophe, and you mix in a bunch of other latent factors present, and the same thing would have resulted.

So who's right? Is history guided by great men of history, or is it large systems that direct things, like Tolstoy would say in War and Peace? In today's episode, I'm speaking to Jared Diamond, who previously wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel, and is the author of a new book that looks at this question directly and asks who's right.

And the answer is, it depends on the circumstances, and there's not a one-size-fits-all answer, but we can mostly test for it to see whether the leader or society matters more.

Jared's new book is Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? We discuss how the inbreeding of European royal families created a natural experiment proving that monarchs' intelligence directly affected national outcomes, why Botswana's founding president is the clearest modern example of an irreplaceable leader because only he could have given away his own tribe's diamond rights without starting a civil war, and why Genghis Khan's conquests depend on rainfall patterns revealed by tree rings.

Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it's ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?

My own geography-based theories, people often say, "Jared, have you changed your mind? Here, here's this book about individuals, and your other books, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and so on, are about whole societies for ten thousand years." No, I haven't changed my mind.

It's that I'm asking different questions.

For questions such as, why is it that you and I are now speaking the English language, and you and I evidently of European background, but we're standing on land of Native Americans? That's long-term history.

So that's a question whose answer does not depend upon individual leaders.

Whereas if you want to know why Amazon is now the largest everything store, a store that cares so much about individual customers and doesn't care about paying dividends to its investors, that has everything to do with one person, Jeff Bezos.

Is it correct to think of your new book, again, Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, as in essence the error term? For Guns, Germs, and Steel?

No, I would just say it's a different book about a different question on a different time scale.

We talk a little bit in the podcast about what it means to be a big picture interdisciplinary scientist.

And of course he had a very famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel back in like 1997 I think it was where a very famous big hit, you know a lot of people read it, I read it, won the Pulitzer Prize and it put forward the idea that you know you can't argue that certain areas of the world, certain continents and countries and things like that have kind of dominated a little bit in the last few centuries, have you know taken over other areas and why is that? Is it because the people are just especially clever or have more initiative or whatever? And Diamond argued that no, it had nothing to do, almost nothing to do with the differences between the people in one area or another.

It had more to do with geography and the environment, the ability to do agriculture on large scales, the ability to have enough land, enough natural resources, different kinds of plants but then also different kinds of metal and the guns in the title and of course germs, the ability to maintain immunity or resistance to certain diseases that other people elsewhere didn't have.

So it was sort of a story where individuals didn't make much of a difference in that big picture sweep.

Uh, and I'll, I'll put a link to the book, of course, in the show notes.

But famously, you've written other books, and I wanted to kind of use your previous books just as an intro to get into the new one.

So, um, many of us have read Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example.

Uh, that was a big hit.

And I acknowledge that individual people can make a difference in politics and in business and in sports and in religion and probably in science and in art.

At the opposite extreme though, Guns, Germs, and Steel had nothing to say about individual leaders, and I was explicit there.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is about the history of the whole world over the last 12,000 years, and it's about the history of large parts of the world.

Over the course of 12,000 years, one individual could not make a difference in the growth of societies in different parts of the world, because growth of societies in different parts of the world depended ultimately on agricultural productivity, on population growth, and agricultural and animal productivity depended upon whether any area had the right plants and animals to domesticate.

No Aboriginal Australian could have propelled Aboriginal Australia to develop atomic bombs in writing, because Australia still today has no domesticable animals.

Aboriginal Australians didn't develop farming.

There were a minimum of domestical plants.

In short, then, Guns, Germs, and Steel was about the history of large areas of the world over the last 10,000 years where...

Great pleasure to meet you.

I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel, and, uh, I just got into this yesterday, uh, and today.

I, I started reading your new book.

Uh, awesome.

Yes.

And so Mormonism has done well at, at spreading in Europe and the Pacific.

There's one other thing that, that I'd, I'd like to say here, um, and that is that, that people often ask me, um, "Jared, 'Guns, Germs, and Steel,' um, neglects individual people.

It's about things that happened over the last 10,000 years, um, and 'Guns, Germs, and Steel,' the different outcomes of societies in different continent has nothing to do with any individual." Um, whereas here you've written a book about leaders, about individuals.