The Joe Rogan Experience - #2549 - Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond, PhD, is a professor, scientist, historian, and author of several books, including “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” “Collapse,” and “Why Is Sex Fun?” His latest book, “Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,” is available now.www.harpercollins.com/products/profits-prophets-coaches-and-kings-jared-diamondwww.jareddiamond.org Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visit https://ketone.com/Rogan for 30% OFF, or find Ketone-IQ at Target nationwide. Get 30% off + 2 free gifts at https://ARMRA.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Duration: 2h 37m
Broadcast on: 03 Sep 2026
Audio Format: other

Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan.

Visit https://ketone.com/Rogan for 30% OFF, or find Ketone-IQ at Target nationwide.

Get 30% off + 2 free gifts at https://ARMRA.com/rogan

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

(dramatic music) - Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. - The Joe Rogan Experience. - Shoring by day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (upbeat music) - Very nice meeting you, sir. - It's a pleasure, it's a great pleasure to meet you. - I really enjoyed Guns, Germs and Steel, and I just got into this yesterday, and today I started reading your new book. Awesome, awesome so far, fascinating. I have so many questions. But my first one is, have you done podcasts before? - I've done podcasts, quite a few podcasts at home in my wife's study on my wife's tell screen, and I've done face-to-face interviews like with you. - Oh, okay, cool. So, first of all, why did you write this book? - Why did I write this book? A short answer is, I was born in 1937, which means that I grew up in the Second World War under the shadow of Hitler. Every day there was something going on with the war. My father paced it up on the wall, my bedroom, a map of the European theater and the Pacific theater, and that there was always the question why did it happen, and if it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still have been that outcome? Then I moved to Europe, I lived in England, I lived in Germany, I love German music, I love the German language, why? And then I moved to Chile, I lived in Chile, the most democratic country of South America. Before Pinochet, nobody saw what was coming with Pinochet, his own fellow generals didn't see it coming. And so there's been, throughout my life, this question, do bad as well as good people make a difference. Also my wife was posed, the last of my family in Europe disappeared in the whole course. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz, she survived, but others of the family didn't survive. And so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question. And then leaders have made a difference in my life. There was the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department who, when a pump, water pump that I had been operating, blew overnight, and it flooded my lab room, but it also flooded the lab room below me. And that was a poor choice of lab room to flood because it belonged to Lord Adrian, Nobel Prize winner,

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