Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond says perhaps the main advice is to make sure you do something you enjoy, because that is what most people do not do. His friend, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, asked his father as a teenager what to do for a career. The father said do something you are good at, something you enjoy, and something that makes a difference in the world.

Jared Diamond says if people tell you that you have to live your life their way, tell them to go to hell. As a graduate he did not iron his shirts, and he says whether his shirts are ironed does not make much difference to life. What does make a difference is whether he enjoys the work, is good at it, and whether the work is good for the world. He spen

Jared Diamond says he is not aware of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg having a philosophy of life beyond their business. The business leader he admires as a person is the Patagonia leader he knows. For the Patagonia leader, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life, and he has a philosophy of life. Steve Jobs had a philosophy of life as regards business.

Jared Diamond has had several lengthy conversations with Bill Gates and likes him. People who met Bill Gates under other circumstances hold different views. Jared Diamond met Elon Musk once and met Jeff Bezos once, and he does not know many leaders in the business world. The Patagonia leader emphasized time off for his staff and Pata

Jared Diamond says coaches get fired after a losing season, and CEOs get fired when a company has a poor year and low returns. Fire a CEO after a losing season and the new CEO usually has a better season the next year. 70% of the variance in a sports outcome is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO.

He compares the firing to dice. Throw a one, call the thrower lousy, and fire that person. Five out of six times the next thrower does better than one, because the other faces are two, three, four, five, and six. In sports, the new coach usually has a better record for the same random reasons. Jared Diamond says his university, UCLA, now has an athletic department $150 million i

Jared Diamond says a sharp sense of time left has not always been part of his life. Turning 80 was not a shock. Turning 81 was a bigger shock, because 81 meant he was firmly embedded in the 80s. He already knew the life expectancy of an American man at birth is something like 78. He also knew a fact he says is not widely known: once an American man has reached 70, life expectancy is 93, because a lot of the risk is behind him. At 81 he still was not counting what he could do.

In the last couple of years, now that he is 89, he is very conscious of the time left. He wants to synthesize his understanding of New Guinea, which has 10 mountain ranges. He did the first ascents and the first ornith

Jared Diamond negotiated with his graduate students and postdocs so each project interested both him and the student. He made the investment only when the project also made sense for him.

He could take only two or three students at a time. A student stayed for three or four years, and he had worked hard to find the funds. On only one occasion a student asked for his own project. A wonderful Argentinian student said he had been told that, in the physiology department, a postdoc spends half his time on the advisor's project and half the time on his own. Jared Diamond says the claim was untrue, though the student had found another postdoc of whom it was true. Taken aback, Jared Diamond agreed,

Jared Diamond says vervet monkey grunts function as words. Each grunt names a different danger, and the other monkeys answer with a matching move.

Bird songs already carry a lot of information, and similar studies followed in monkeys. A husband and wife at UCLA later moved to Pennsylvania. They did the vervet monkey work. Vervet monkeys make grunts, and the pair thought some of the grunts sound a little different, so they recorded the grunts and played them back. Some grunts made the monkeys look up. Some made them look down. Some made them prop themselves up. One grunt means eagle. When a vervet monkey gives the eagle grunt, the others look up. Another grunt means python. When they hear py

Jared Diamond says birds inform ornithologists about everything. Birds are the easiest of all animals to observe and to understand. Birds operate by sight and by sound, the same senses humans use. Mammals operate especially by smell.

People can watch antelopes, but they do not go around watching rats. Understanding rats takes a good sense of smell, and people catch them in trash. Birds can be watched. Most of what is known about ecology, evolutionary biology, biogeography, and behavior was learned first on birds and in the most detail about birds. The knowledge then applies to other animals.

Jared Diamond has written lots about ecology, lots about how birds divide ecological niches, and lo

Jared Diamond says life in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the time, and still fascinating enough to stay.

He had already felt physical misery in Peru. In New Guinea the food is sweet potatoes and rice, three meals a day, and the jungle means bites from scrub mites. His first year there he got dysentery that doctors at Harvard could not cure, and it stayed with him for a year. His third year he got malaria while climbing mountains. About once in three months he can sit at a campsite, look out, and call the view beautiful. The rest of the time he is physically miserable and dealing with New Guineans who have their own ideas about what to do in life.

The discomfort is the price of

Jared Diamond says the longest serving medical school dean in the United States gave him five thousand dollars every year to keep studying New Guinea birds after offering him a physiology job at UCLA. Diamond says most medical school deans would have told him to get out. The dean tolerated the work and made it possible.

The dean was offering Diamond the job. Diamond said he was interested in New Guinea birds, had spent three months every summer for the last several years working on them, and wanted to continue. He asked whether the dean would still tolerate the bird work if he accepted. The dean told him UCLA Medical School was interested in New Guinea birds and would give him five thousand

Jared Diamond has made lists ever since age three. His mother, a teacher who loved teaching, taught him to read when he was three, and he began a notebook he still has. He listed rivers, animals, animals of the Rocky Mountains, and birds of Europe. He also listed the streetcar numbers on the Boston streetcar system. He was a lister, and he loves making lists.

Making lists has given Jared Diamond a lot of mileage in biology. After his PhD, he was a membrane biologist. Among his contributions, he carried out the largest study ever of how permeable a biological membrane is to non-electrolytes. He and his first post-doctoral student measured the permeability of rabbit gallbladder to 210 non-ele

Jared Diamond looked at 22 outstanding political leaders from World War II onward and found that only two stepped down voluntarily. He thinks the table is in the third chapter of his book.

He includes Stalin, Sadat, Mussolini, and Hitler. Nelson Mandela, the founding post-apartheid leader of South Africa, retired voluntarily as prime minister, and Jared Diamond thinks Nelson Mandela was in his 80s. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, served as prime minister and also stepped down voluntarily. Jared Diamond says the time in office might have run 30 years and might have run 40. The other 20 did not leave on their own. Sadat was assassinated, Hitler committed suicide, Winston C

Jared Diamond talked his department into keeping his second graduate student after the student did poorly on an exam. The student later became an outstanding researcher. Diamond forgives mistakes because people forgave him when his own career nearly ended.

For 36 years he was professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School, running laboratory experiments with graduate students and postdocs. Quite a few of them screwed up and made big mistakes. His department wanted to expel the second graduate student over the exam. Diamond convinced them to let him stay. A couple of other students had close calls too.

Diamond says he came close himself to having his career ended, and people forgave him. Hi

Jared Diamond says his life and his wife's life were formed under the shadow of Hitler. He was born in 1937 and grew up through World War II in the United States. He was not bombed and he was not orphaned, but every day he can remember was formed by the war.

His first memory is the first photo the United States Army released of dead American soldiers, a famous Life magazine cover of two soldiers dead face down in New Guinea. His family is Jewish from Eastern Europe, and the last of his family disappeared in the Holocaust. He married into a Polish family. His wife's parents came to the United States in 1948. His wife's mother survived Auschwitz. Other members of her family did not.

Other le

Si Sheppard says steel armor and steel helmets mattered more than guns once native fighters got past the first shock.

A few hundred men with Cortés fought the Tlaxcalans, who numbered in the multiple thousands, to a standstill, and he was still fighting without native allies. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel lists the Spanish advantages, but Sheppard says firearms drop out of the real fight because they took so long to reload. Local weapons of wood, stone, and obsidian stayed dangerous as slashing blades. Obsidian is razor sharp. Against steel armor, and especially steel helmets, it did much less.

The other half of the edge was training. Conquistadors used long Toledo steel swords as