The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau
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Jared Diamond
Nations and individuals share the same techniques to survive a crisis—and thrive beyond it.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse, and Upheaval
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
Jared Diamond is the epitome of a celebrity scientist—a Pulitzer Prize winner, a #1 New York Times bestselling author, and one of the world’s Top 10 Public Intellectuals (Foreign Policy). He also uniquely addresses our world in crisis—the pandemic, natural disasters, political polarization, and more—in his eloquent writing. His series of books that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel is “one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation” (The New York Times). Diamond shows how we can learn from the lessons of past civilizations to thrive during times of crisis—not only individually, but together.
“A riveting and illuminating tour of how nations deal with crises – which might hopefully help humanity as a whole deal with our present global crisis.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, on Upheaval
In his blockbusters Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise, thrive, or fall. Now in Upheaval—which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list—he shows how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change: a coping mechanism more commonly associated with personal trauma. His keynotes take audiences on a journey through some of the most profound evolutionary questions of our time: why do some societies prosper while others die? And what can we learn from the collective history of every human society? Focusing on how we can improve contemporary society by learning from the past, Diamond’s message is both urgent and persuasive.
Guns, Germs, and Steel (adapted into a hit three-part documentary by the National Geographic Society and broadcast on PBS) explained how the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences. The follow-up, Collapse, examined a range of past societies to identify why they either collapsed or continued to thrive. In Upheaval, Diamond reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient—a narrative both epic and groundbreaking. In suite with the first two titles in series, Upheaval inspires a new talk that adds psychological dimension to the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics, and anthropology that marks all of Diamond’s work. Bill Gates calls it one of his Top 5 Summer Books, saying that “[Diamond] reminds us that some countries have creatively solved their biggest problems … showing that there’s a path through crisis and that we can choose to take it.”
Currently a professor of Geography at UCLA, Diamond is also the author of the internationally bestselling books The World Until Yesterday, and The Third Chimpanzee. He has received some of the world’s most prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Genius Award, the Dickson Prize in Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the National Medal of Science, America’s highest civilian award in science. Foreign Policy has named him one of the world’s top 10 public intellectuals.
Speech Topics
Politics & SocietyRead more
UpheavalTurning Points for Nations in Crisis
In a new talk based on his acclaimed book Upheaval, Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond reveals how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change. In a dazzling comparative study, he shows audiences how seven countries have survived defining upheavals in the recent past—from US Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan to the Soviet invasion of Finland to Pinochet’s regime...
Change ManagementRead more
The National and the PersonalTwo Views on Advancing Through Crisis
When a nation experiences crisis, selective change must be adopted in order to come out the other side. As people, we also experience personal crises, triggered by factors like time-of-life (think teen anguish or midlife crossroads) or external shocks (like divorce, the death of a loved one, professional or financial strain). In this talk, Jared Diamond highlights the macro to help us understan...
Politics & SocietyRead more
Tribal SocietiesLearning from Traditional Tribal Societies about Dealing with Dangers
We citizens of all big modern industrialized societies take for granted many features shared among those societies—such as encountering strangers every day without freaking out, living in societies of thousands or millions of people under a central government with laws and police, and eating food grown by other people. We forget that all of those shared features emerged only recently in the his...
ReligionRead more
On ReligionExtraterrestrial Life, and the Functions of Human Religion
In recent decades, astronomers have discovered at least 3,264 planets orbiting nearby stars, many of those planets similar in size to our planet Earth, and some of them with conditions suitable for the evolution of life. We now estimate that the whole universe contains on the order of a billion planets supporting life, some of those life forms less intelligent than us, some more intelligent tha...
Politics & SocietyRead more
Societal DevelopmentThe History of Everybody, for the Last 13,000 Years
Today, there are huge differences between peoples of the five inhabited continents in their wealth and power. In particular, over the last five centuries, European peoples have expanded and conquered around the world. Why did history turn out that way, instead of in a different or opposite way? Why didn’t the Aztec Emperor Montezuma conquer Spain, instead of the actual result that soldiers of S...
Politics & SocietyRead more
American OpportunitiesThe Strengths of the U.S., and the Most Important Problems Facing the America Today
The U.S. is the richest country in the world, with the world’s strongest military. Those strengths of ours arise from our underlying geographic, socio-economic, and political advantages. But history shows us that countries enjoying advantages can squander them, as has happened to Argentina, Brazil, and China. In this keynote, Jared Diamond explains that the U.S. today faces four fundamental unf...
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