#2549 - Jared Diamond

**Jared Diamond** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking in.

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Jared Diamond** (0:13)
It's a pleasure to meet you. Great pleasure to meet you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
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?

**Jared Diamond** (0:31)
I've done podcasts, quite a few podcasts, at home in my wife's study on my wife's screen, and I've done face-to-face interviews like with you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:43)
Oh, okay. Cool. First of all, why did you write this book?

**Jared Diamond** (0:48)
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 up on the wall of my bedroom, a map of the European Theater and the Pacific Theater, and 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 is Polish. The last of my family in Europe disappeared in the Holocaust. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz. She survived, but all the other 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, the father of father-in-law of my thesis supervisor, and the master of my college at Cambridge. Not a good choice.

**Joe Rogan** (2:45)
Oh, no.

**Jared Diamond** (2:46)
The chairman of the department called me in. I thought I'm going to be thrown out.
He said that was sloppy. You have to be careful with water pumps, and be more careful in the future. That permitted my scientific career to continue. Other people might have thrown me out. So leaders have made a difference in my life.

**Joe Rogan** (3:10)
Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world. And one of the things that really terrifies me is Nazi Germany was not that long ago. And there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again. That that type of scenario where a group of people are completely other to the point where they're not human anymore, that a nation goes along with it, like that, we thought we were done with that forever. I don't believe that anymore. As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is and that there is always these battles of, for lack of better terms, good and evil. Good leaders who generally just want something good for their people. They want to leave a mark and be remembered as someone who made a difference. Then leaders who just want to take over all the systems and make sure they can't be contested and want to dominate the country and change it.
You make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance and about all these different factors that lead to leaders either having successful runs or not successful. There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration. You open the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident.
What would the world have looked like if these cars had just been moving? One was two seconds ahead, one was two seconds behind, perfect impact, dead Hitler, now what? What would the world look like? There's so many instances. What if JFK didn't get shot? What if Martin Luther King Jr. didn't get shot? There's so many different moments in history where you go, how would culture look? How would society, how would civilization look if just a few things had been off?