367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. History, to me, has always been one of the most intimidating academic subjects, uh just because it's at the opposite end of physics in the simplification scale. If you think about How many things happened? in any one historical period. L literally the number of events that you could potentially write down and record. Well, it's infinite, or it's essentially infinite, you know, if you think about every single person doing everything that they're doing.

History has to be a story of picking and choosing. Certain things being important and certain things being unimportant. And it's more than just Picking ones that sort of are popular or whatever, you know, when we say what's important, what's unimportant, we're trying to be explanatory. We're trying to tell a story that makes sense. of history. Why did this happen? What might we learn from this particular thing happening at that particular point in time? And once you start doing that, once you start asking like why did this happen, why did that happen, there's one obvious question that comes up over and over again, not yet completely settled, of course, which is the relative importance of individuals, right? The great man theory of history, or at least the idea that one

plucky, charismatic, right place, right time, individual person. can make choices that have a huge impact on the historical trajectory that goes from there, versus the idea that actually they don't. Like maybe we tell stories of presidents and kings and generals and scientists and whatever, but really even without those individuals, things would have happened almost exactly the same. It's very hard to tell because we only have one historical record, right? We can't actually run the parallel universes and see what's going on. So one of the voices that you might sometimes hear in this uh debate about grand historical deterministic forces versus plucky individuals is today's guest, Jared Diamond, um, who's a professor at UCLA who I'm I'm not gonna I'm not sure I'm gonna get this right. I believe he started as a professor of physiology and then moved into geography. Um we we talk a little bit in the podcast about what it means to be a big picture interdisciplinary scientist.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (77 minutes, 11,827 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.