Full transcript: Jared Diamond on London Real
1:04 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose We’re sponsored today by the folks at x-brain who are the makers of way better protein powder It’s organic grass-fed and sweet with stevia You can go to x-brain dot co dot UK and get 15% off with customer code London Real We’re also sponsored by the folks at bulletproof coffee, which is a coffee free of molds and toxins You mix it with grass-fed butter, brain octane oil, and yeah, it’s a fantastic drink. So thank you for those guys for supporting this show.
1:37 Our guest today is Mr. Jared Diamond, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of international bestsellers such as Guns, Germs, and Steel. I get a bit of a chill when I say that. Your book Collapse and then your new book, which is The World Until Yesterday. You are a professor at UCLA.
1:54 You’re known from drawing from a variety of fields. the name polymath, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. You also attended Cambridge here in England, I think quite a long time ago. And so thank you for coming back to the UK, and Jared, welcome to London Real.
2:14 Jared Diamond: It’s always a pleasure to be back in the UK and in London in particular.
2:19 Brian Rose: You know, I wanted to ask you that before we dive into your literary works. You were in Cambridge in 61, is that right?
2:26 Jared Diamond: I was here 58 to 62.
2:28 Brian Rose: Wow, okay, that’s quite some time ago before I was born. And what was that experience like?
2:33 Were you itching to get to England or was it kind of a cultural shift when you were coming from Boston at the time? Is that right?
2:41 Jared Diamond: Yes, I was born and grew up, I was born and grew up in Boston. I spent my life in Boston and so I was ready to go somewhere else, preferably as far as possible, but no other planet was available. And Cambridge was world leading at that time physiology the discipline I wanted to study and also Britain in addition to its other virtues Cambridge is close to London which has wonderful music and theatre and Britain is close to the continent which has all those other interesting people
3:12 Brian Rose: Wow and so what was it like when you were here what would yeah what do you remember most from 58 to 62
3:19 Jared Diamond: interesting times there were interesting times and in retrospect in fact this is going to be the subject of my next book 58 to 62 in retrospect was a key time in British history when Britain was going through a painful transition of dismantling the empire, losing Britain’s traditional identity of the empire in which the world never set the most powerful fleet, the biggest economy.
3:43 Britain was having to find a new identity and was struggling at the time. Britain was poorer, was dismantling the fleet, had its first race riots. So it was an interesting and I’d say tumultuous time in Britain then.
3:55 Brian Rose: I’ve been reading a biography from, a listening actually, an audiobook from Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones and he’s kind of walking you through British history, late 50s, early 60s. And I think we forget how war-torn this country was and how much of a, I guess, a hangover you could say that World War II was and he was saying there were more horse-drawn vehicles after the Second War than there was after the First War in central London.
4:20 And like you said, I think that was a huge transition time that people forget about England.
4:27 Jared Diamond: My first visit to the UK, in fact, was in 1950 when I was 12 years old. And at that time, there was still food rationing, there were still lots of bombed out sites in London that had not been rebuilt. Friends of my parents, whom we visited, although they were a distinguished scientist couple, living in a house without electricity, with a wooden table lit by candles, not elegant Victorian candles, but rough peasants candles.
5:01 And dinner was corn mush because they didn’t have anything better to eat. This was Britain five years after the war.
5:10 Brian Rose: Wow, that must have been amazing to see. So you made your trips over to Papua New Guinea after you finished at Cambridge, is that right?
5:20 Jared Diamond: first PNG trip was 1964 after I got my PhD and after I returned to the U.S.
5:25 Brian Rose: When you came here in England in 1958, did you ever see that evolution of your career because you studied physiology here at Cambridge, is that right?
5:34 Jared Diamond: That’s true. No, I did not foresee that evolution of my career. I assumed that getting a PhD in physiology, I would then go on to do physiology and become a professor at a medical school, which I did, but within a year or two of getting my Ph.D. in being in medical school, it suddenly hit me the awful realization that I’m expected to do gallbladder physiology for the rest of my life and my aspirations extended beyond the gallbladder.
6:01 And so I cooked up a project to go to Peru for mountain climbing and then to watch Birds in the Amazon. And the next year, my friend and I cooked up a project to go to New Guinea, which was wild and adventurous to watch birds. And I love New Guinea, so I’ve been going back ever since.
6:19 Brian Rose: And you went there originally for the birds.
6:21 Jared Diamond: I went there originally for the birds, second for the birds, third for the birds, and always for the birds.
6:28 Brian Rose: And the observation of the humans was a secondary or just an ancillary benefit.
6:32 Jared Diamond: It’s incidental in that to do anything in New Guinea, all land in New Guinea is owned by people. So you can’t just walk around and watch birds. You have to ask the permission of the local people. May I watch birds in your garden?
6:45 And in addition to follow the trail, I get local people to guide me on the trail, and then they point out the birds, but we’re always chatting. So as we’re watching birds, they wanna know, well, how many wives do you have and how many pigs do you have and how big is your garden? I then say, how many wives do you have, how many pigs do you have? So we’re chatting about all sorts of life and times.
7:05 Brian Rose: And can you describe what it was like when you first went there?
7:08 You must have heard stories, you must have mentally prepared yourself or what the people were like, but what was it really like when you arrived?
7:18 Jared Diamond: Well, before I’d gone there, I was naive and I knew that New Guineans had recently, and some of them still were using stone tools. They had been fighting, they didn’t have clothing, they didn’t have writing, they didn’t have state government. They were what was then called primitive people. I didn’t know what to expect, and it took me about one day to realize that these are smart, normal people as curious and engaged as any American or Europeans.
7:47 Yes, they were recently using stone tools. And there must be a reason why these smart people did not invent steel tools themselves. That question, why the difference in technology was in the back of my mind and led to my book, Guns, Germs, and Steel because it took me 25 years to figure out the answer.
8:08 Brian Rose: Right, because that was book was in 97 that was published, is that right?
8:13 Jared Diamond: That was 97.
8:14 Brian Rose: And your first visit was 64, 65?
8:16 Jared Diamond: First visit to New Guinea was 64, then 65, then 66.
8:20 Brian Rose: And those ideas already started in your head as far as those kind of questions to yourself?
8:26 Jared Diamond: The ideas, no, the questions, yes. The question, why did these people end up with stone tools, came up right at the beginning.
8:34 The answer, I didn’t know the answer. Historians didn’t know the answer. Historians didn’t discuss the question because it was too big a question. The question gradually grew on me, particularly after, in 1972, a New Guinean asked me straight out. He didn’t say, Jared, you are dope, so why on earth did you and your dopey society invent metal?
8:57 And we didn’t. Instead he asked, why is it that you white people have all the cargo and we black people don’t? I blabbered something, but as soon as I blabbered it, I knew it was wrong, and that got me thinking about the answer to this biggest question of history, namely why history unfolded differently on different continents.
9:14 Brian Rose: And it’s that story that you start off guns germs and steal with. That’s the beginning of guns germs.
9:19 That is, and there’s something about those personal stories and those anecdotes about you in PNG, as you say, that really draw me in and seem to draw the readers in. And it’s something about those kind of anecdotal tales of your observations in New Guinea. And you’ve been there, so you’ve seen the real deal. And then mixed in with your theories that make your books hard to put down. Is that a fair synopsis of your writing style?
9:46 Jared Diamond: I would say so. Yes, my books are always about big questions. There are historians who write only about the American Civil War. There are books published about the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. I don’t write that sort of book.
10:03 I like big questions such as why did history unfold differently on different continents? What are the differences in my latest book between traditional small societies and big societies with state governments and things like bringing up children and treating old people and dealing with dangers. I’m interested in large scale questions that arise as a result of comparing New Guinea with the United States and other places.
10:27 Brian Rose: Okay, can I tell you my story of when I first read Guns, Trams, and Steel?
10:31 Yes. Okay, it’s a book that had been coming on my radar. Different people, my father suggested, a friend, and I had had it, and I had at a hard time, I think, jumping into it, it’s quite a large book, and I took it with me on a trip to Argentina with my girlfriend at the time. We went to Buenos Aires, and then we went to Punta del Este, which is a little tip on Uruguay, and I was there for New Year’s with this beautiful blonde girl, and we had a place on the beach for like 10 days, and I was like, okay, this is going to be a great vacation.
11:02 And after two days, Jared, I was bored out of my mind. And so I picked up Guns, Germs, and Steel, and it just blew my mind. And for the next eight days, I was reading it. And one thing I remember is it’s a very, I found it a very modular book. So I would pick chapters, say 12, and then I would flip check back to chapter seven, and then you would make a reference to something else.
11:23 And I found that I read it in a very non-sequential way. And it really expanded my mind when you went through everything. And you said some of the stories there. You started off with this gentleman in PNG asking you why the white people have the cargo and he doesn’t. And you took it further to why did the Spanish land in North America and kill everyone?
11:45 And why didn’t the people of Central America go to Spain and kill everyone? And that’s how I describe you when people ask me about Guns, Germs, and Steel. I said, why did it go this way and not this way? But there are so many more things you explore with that book, whether it comes to just the general division of labor, the fertile plains, the north-south, the domestication of animals. Did it take you 30 years to write that book?
12:11 Jared Diamond: No, no. I began, Yali asked me his question, the question, why do you white people have the cargo, you dopes? I’m leading you around in the jungle you can’t follow a trail, so why on earth did you invent metal tools?” He asked me the question in 1972. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I even began getting ideas about this. And for a conference, I think in 1986, I did a paper which was my first attempt to deal with a question.
12:42 I then began, as you say, my approach is modular. I wrote an article on plant domestication. I wrote an article on writing systems, I wrote an article on technology. My books tend to be modular in that they’re broken up into subjects which I learn about the subject, I write that chapter, I go on to the next chapter, but at the beginning, I’ll have planned out the book. So at the beginning of Gunn’s Room of Steel, I realized the first half of the book has to be about the origins of agriculture because the reasons why different continents had different human histories, has had to do with different origins of agriculture.
13:24 And then after six chapters on the origins of agriculture, which meant spending some time learning about domestic animals, and then some time learning about domestic plants, and then some time learning about east-west axes, then I went on to a chapter on writing, so I learned about writing systems, then a chapter on technology, so I learned about technology, And then five chapters going around the world, a chapter on Africa, a chapter on Australia, a chapter on China. So yes, you’ve got the essence, the books on modular books. Otherwise it would be overwhelming to write a book about the history of the world for the last 11,000 years without breaking it into pieces.
14:08 Brian Rose: Did you ever look at yourself in the mirror and said, Jared, I’m biting off too much?
14:13 Jared Diamond: No. No. I said the question is a fascinating question. question.
14:17 Brian Rose: And you probably could have covered 60% of that and still had a work of art with that book, but you really drilled down deep on all of those things you just mentioned.
14:26 Jared Diamond: I think it was necessary to cover 100% if I had discussed the origins of agriculture and had not had a chapter on Aboriginal Australia to say why agriculture never arose in Aboriginal Australia, or if I had never had a chapter on North America to explain why agriculture rose in North America but was so unproductive despite the fertility of the North American continent, I would have left out big pieces of the argument.
14:55 Brian Rose: Okay. Did your publisher think it was a great idea?
14:58 Did you have to sell this idea and did you know it was going to be such a big success?
15:05 Jared Diamond: My publisher signed up the book based on a prospectus. The plan of the book, I worked out myself. When I sent the book to my publisher, my publisher’s reaction was, this is a long book. It’s true, it’s a long book.
15:21 Brian Rose: How many pages is it?
15:23 Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, Steel is somewhere in the 400s of pages. The test of the length of Guns, Germs, and Steel, or the test of the length of even my most recent book, is that my best foreign language after English was German. And so I have friends of Germany. My book’s been translated into German.
15:43 And when I visited, most recently, my German friends, and they were reading the German translation of my latest book, The World Until Yesterday, they said, Jared, we can’t read your book in bed at night because it’s too heavy to hold. Well, in English it’s 500 pages and in German it’s 750 pages, so no wonder.
16:02 Brian Rose: All right, so that’s the test?
16:04 Jared Diamond: That’s the test.
16:05 Brian Rose: And did you know it was gonna be a success?
16:08 It happen right at once or did it come kind of in waves over a course of years?
16:14 Jared Diamond: In the case of guns, Germans, and steel, it was a moderate success right from the beginning, but the big stimulation was it’s winning the Pulitzer Prize a year after it was published, and that was a total surprise. I didn’t know the book had been nominated. I was sitting at my desk. I didn’t know the Pulitzer Prizes are announced on the first or second Tuesday in April.
16:40 So I was sitting my desk shuffling papers on April, whatever it was, of 1998, and precisely at 12 noon, there was a phone call, and on the line was a reporter, and the reporter was saying, Mr. Diamond, how does it feel to have won the Pulitzer Prize? So my answer was, approximately, my God. And then my next sentence was, Jesus Christ. And then my third sentence was how could I believe that what you’re saying that this isn’t you’re not inventing it?
17:10 And he convinced me that I really had won the Pulitzer Prize
17:14 Brian Rose: and did that open a lot of doors? Yes, okay recognition People looking for your next book Speaking what does that what does that do when you win that prize?
17:25 Jared Diamond: It made it easier for me to get on with my My next book, because I now had a track record, I had a book that really excited people. And so publishers, not just in the U.S., but in other countries, by now my book’s been translated into 38 languages.
17:41 The result was that publishers in Mongolia and Estonia and Vietnam were also interested in this book because they knew that it had won the Pulitzer Prize and that Americans and Europeans were interested in it.
17:55 Brian Rose: Now, can you walk us through your latest book, The World Until Yesterday? You start off again with a tale in Papua New Guinea. You’re at the airport this time, and you’re observing the tremendous change this airport’s had in, say, the last, I guess, 50 years, right?
18:12 I’m guessing there was a very small airport when you were there in 64, 65.
18:17 Jared Diamond: When I was there in 64, the airport of Port Moresby, which is now the capital of the country of Papua New Guinea which occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea which is just north of Australia.
18:31 Brian Rose: And you explained that in the books and now I got that in my head.
18:36 Jared Diamond: Right. In 1964 the airport consisted of, and mind you this was the capital of an Australian mandated territory, the airport consisted of two wooden rooms. I arrived there not by jet plane but by a prop plane by an overnight flight from Australia.
18:53 The center of Port Moresby, the capital, consisted of an intersection, and the intersection either had either there was no traffic light in the capital or there was one traffic light in the country, and it was at this one intersection. I also remember that the intersection was at the bottom of a hill in New Guinea, the Lingua Franca, because there are 1,000 native languages. The language that people use for intercommunication is called Pigeon English or Neo-Melanesian, which sounds like baby talk or like English, but it’s got its own grammar.
19:29 And I remember a sign on the road coming down to the main intersection in the country, and the sign in Pigeon English said, you know can wheel wheel down long dispeller kill, which meant you cannot wheel, you cannot ride a bicycle down this hill. you know, can wheel, wheel, download this pelican.
19:47 Brian Rose: So you could understand the pigeon.
19:49 Jared Diamond: I could figure it out.
19:51 Brian Rose: You could figure it out.
19:52 And now there’s been a massive change, and that’s how you start this book out, by just observing the people in the airport and how their lives have changed. Is that about right? Or can you explain the premise behind the world until yesterday?
20:07 Jared Diamond: Sure. The Port Moresby Airport today, you arrive there and it looks like a normal airport.
20:13 There are security screening machines and X-ray machines and baggage agents and people at a counter and computers and people wandering around and signs with the destinations and flashing lights. But you look, and the people, they’re not all Americans, they’re all New Guineans, and the names of the destinations are not London, Manchester, Edinburgh, but the destinations are Wapenamanda, Kuroca, Telefomen. In other words, it looks like an airport as in the rest of the world, but this is New Guinea.
20:50 And yet, in 50 years earlier, there were still lots of people in New Guinea, including some friends of mine, who were still using stone tools. And most people in New Guinea didn’t write, and there was not yet a university in New Guinea. In short, in 49 years, New Guinea jump through changes, the acquisition of writing, the acquisition of airplanes, the acquisition of independent state government, changes that took 5,400 years in the Fertile Crescent and Western Europe.
21:23 New Guinea has telescoped into a short time the transition from a traditional small-scale society without writing or government to a modern society with government and writing.
21:33 Brian Rose: And so you like to look at that and then try to make observations about the rest of the world, which has been quote unquote civilized, or I know you hate that word civilization because it has a lot of loaded connotations with it. But for someone that doesn’t know and hasn’t read those two books, can you explain why you study the New Guineans and why you can learn so much from these people that haven’t been exposed to the Western way of doing things that we have?
22:01 Jared Diamond: I go to New Guinea because it is so fascinating. Once you’ve been to New Guinea, The rest of the world is boring. New Guinea is, it’s fascinating, it’s beautiful. The people themselves, they’re very diverse. There are a thousand different languages in New Guinea.
22:16 Not dialects, but a thousand different languages. Many is different from each other as Chinese is from Japanese is from English. And the people themselves, they’re curious, they’re alert, they’re asking questions. The children are independent. Five-year-old kids will negotiate with me and from a position of equality.
22:38 So the people themselves are really interesting people. I go to New Guinea because it’s fascinating, and fun, and maddening, and I learn a lot from them.
22:47 Brian Rose: And what can we learn from these people? You walk through a lot of interesting things in your book, whether it comes to pain for an accidental death of a child, or the way people take care of their elderly. What do you think that we can learn, not just you, but we can learn from observing these people?
23:05 Jared Diamond: Take away a quick summary of what we can learn from New Guineans or other traditional people, people living in small societies like rural Africans or Aboriginal Australians or Native Americans in North America or South America. They’re all people. They’re all dealing with the same universal human problems that you and I deal with, namely they have children. They’ve raised their children. They live to an old age or they hope to live to an old age. They face dangers. They try to remain healthy. They do or they don’t have religion. They learn languages. They have arguments and they have to settle the arguments. Everything that people do in the U.K. and the U.S. and elsewhere. But traditional societies, they’re far more diverse than a society with state government. Once you get a society with state government. All societies with a central government, whether they’re Japanese or Israeli or British or Argentinian, once you have a government you have to have a system of justice and central control and political organization so that all modern industrial societies are similar whether they’re Japanese or English.
24:20 Whereas traditional societies, they’re far more varied. They’re hunter-gatherers, They’re traditional farmers, they’re pastoralists. Some of them move nomadic, some of them are not nomadic. Some of them abandon and kill their old people. Many of them offer their old people much better lives than old people enjoy in the US and in Britain.
24:50 So one could summarize it by saying that traditional societies are thousands of experiments on how to organize a human society, experiments that we would never dream, we would never be permitted to carry out in the U.S., but the experiments have been run. And so you can learn from them. That doesn’t mean that everything that goes on in New Guinea is wonderful. There are a couple of New Guinea tribes where when a man dies, his widow is strangled, not against her will.
25:15 She calls upon her brothers to come strangle her. And that’s not something that I recommend for, I don’t recommend widow strangling, there are other things that are wonderful, such as how they bring up children and how they think clearly about danger and why they never get diabetes or heart disease or stroke. And why is that? They never get diabetes or heart disease or stroke because of their lifestyle. It’s a physically vigorous lifestyle.
25:42 Traditionally, they did not have salt or they had minuscule quantities of salt, whereas we Americans and British consume 10 grams of salt per day. In New Guinea, Ireland, or traditionally, would have 50 milligrams of salt per day. There was a restaurant in Orange County, east of Los Angeles, where some chemists measured the amount of salt in one noodle dish. And that noodle dish had 18 grams of salt, which is one year’s salt intake for New Guinean. So of course, if in one day you have a year’s worth of salt, you end up with hypertension and stroke, whereas New Guineans never get, literally never get hypertension and stroke.
26:23 Brian Rose: All right, so you’re offering up these ideas to the rest of the world just so we can see how other people have done it. So we can kind of look at how we do things and what question them to a certain extent.
26:36 Jared Diamond: We can see how other people have done it and some of the ways that they do it, we may think are bad, like strangling widows, and some of the ways they do it, such as having babies sleep with their parents for the first three or four years of their life, we may not like that, but some of the ways they do it, such as never dying of heart disease or stroke, and such as raising children who are curious, everything that we would want for our own children, children who are curious, self-confident, can negotiate with adults, don’t go through an adolescent crisis.
27:12 That’s something that we do want for our own kids.
27:15 Brian Rose: I’m thinking you were born at a very interesting time because when Guns and Germs came out in 97, there wasn’t much of an internet. And now, take us 16 years later, and now everyone is plugged in. Everyone is looking at their mobile device constantly. Everyone has this kind of new social network that’s way beyond the Dunbar number.
27:35 And I was wondering what you think of that. I know it’s a very general question, but you must have some observations as to where we’re going because if you saw the New Guineans accelerate so fast, now you take us on the last 16 years and we’ve gone to this really pushing our frontal cortex, I would think. What are your thoughts in general?
27:55 Jared Diamond: Well, I can give you a contrast what it’s like to talk with the New Guinean and what a traditional New Guinean and what it’s like to talk with an American of the generation of my sons who were 26 years old.
28:07 When you talk with the New Guinean, it’s a full attention conversation. the guy or the woman is not looking in his or her lap at his cell phone, he’s not text messaging, he’s looking you in the face and listening to you and there’s no distractions. And the talking may go on for hours because there’s no television and nothing else to do. Whereas the younger generation today, when they’re talking, if they are even willing to stoop to talk to someone of my age, Yes, in their lap is their handheld, and there’s pushing buttons and send the text.
28:47 And then they’ll look up and have a bit of a conversation, then look down. Let me tell you a story, because this is a touching story of the consequences of this, the consequences of no longer conversing, looking people face-to-face and listening to people as they talk. In Japan, so my wife has Japanese relatives, And as a result, we know life in Japan reasonably well. In Japan, 50 years ago, most marriages were arranged. The couples did not date.
29:17 Instead, there were professional marriage brokers or other parents arranged the marriage. And nowadays, most Japanese select their spouses. But the change in Japan has been quick. It’s been 50 years, and those 50 years have coincided with the arrival of the electronic media. And Japanese today use their cell phones in their hand-helds and so on.
29:38 So our Japanese cousin was in a, and the result is that young Japanese have not acquired the social skills required to date and to make a relationship. So our cousin was in a Japanese restaurant. And at a table, there was a young man and a young girl. They were sitting there very well dressed up, but they were obviously awkward. And it was obvious that they were there on first date, and so they were sitting there.
30:09 But they were both abashed, both looking in their laps, and they weren’t talking to each other. One would do this, and then the other would do this. They were so awkward, and they were so socially unskilled, that on their first date, they were text messaging each other.
30:28 Brian Rose: I’m sure that’s not the first time that’s happened. I’m sure.
30:32 So what does that mean we’re going? I mean, you make a lot of observations about all sorts of different parts of our society. What are the things that concern you the most? What two or three things?
30:42 Jared Diamond: Yeah.
30:42 There are so many things that concern me about our society. One is my concern about the direction that the whole world is going. We are consuming resources faster than resources are being produced. And we are consuming at a rate such that within 30 or 40 years, we’ll run out of essential resources like fisheries and forests and topsoil and unutilized water. So one thing that I’m concerned about is that the world is going to exhaust its resources, but when that happens, then we start fighting each other in dead earnest for a shrinking resource party.
31:15 Another thing that I’m concerned about is just people’s social skills. If you’ve grown up not spending much time looking someone else in the face and listening to someone, but you’ve communicated by email, or you’ve communicated by text messaging, you just don’t acquire the social skills. Again, I’ll give you a story. I’ve worked for about 14 years in the oil field of Papua New Guinea. So Papua New Guinea has an oil field, which was managed by Chevron, the big international oil company, and is now managed by Oil Search.
31:53 But the land where the oil comes, where the oil is underground. The land belongs to New Guineans who until relatively recently were living really traditional lifestyles without metal tools and so on. But the oil companies have to negotiate with the New Guineans who own the land over the oil leases. And New Guinea is a democracy. This is not Nigeria.
32:18 This is not a place where the army comes in and says what the contract is, but the oil company executives come in and they got to negotiate with the New Guineans. So while I was there, I heard the story from Chevron executives. They were a batch of these, the international Chevron MBAs and international lawyers who were going to come in to negotiate with a batch of villagers for new oil leasing. These villagers had never been more than 10 miles from the village and most of them couldn’t read and they certainly were not lawyers and they weren’t MBAs, but they were going to negotiate with the MBAs overseas, and the expectation was, oh, these poor people, they’re going to get walked over and the oil companies are going to get everything it wants out of these people because the oil company executives have negotiated all around the world.
33:06 But New Guineans have spent their lives negotiating with each other, and so when you put together the New Guineans and the oil company executives, the New Guineans have had such a wide range of negotiating techniques, they would make an agreement and then they would disavow it the next day. They would say something, and then they would say, no, that was a lie. They would come up with all of these negotiating techniques that drove the MBAs and lawyers crazy.
33:33 And at the end of the week, the MBAs and lawyers were only too glad to get out of there, having signed away most of what they wanted. And the New Guineans got a really good deal for the oiling. That simply means that if you spent your life in face-to-face communication from childhood on, from age one or two, a child has had to make his or her own decisions. And from age five, the child is negotiating with an adult. By the time that child is 10, that child is a skilled negotiator and an MBA from overseas is just hopelessly outclassed by these New Guineans.
34:12 Brian Rose: That is a very good story. You’re kind of a man of science, but you always come back to the anecdote. You always come back to the story. Why is that?
34:21 Jared Diamond: The stories illustrate things.
34:23 I could relate facts. And yes, my books are full of facts and some people think my books are too full of facts, but my wife brings me back down to earth. My wife says, Jared, why do you have to relate 38 facts when five facts would suffice? So I do my first draft and prune out 33 facts. And then I’ll usually start off the chapter with an anecdote to give people and myself a feeling for what it’s about.
34:51 And then having told the anecdotes, such as Port Moresby Airport, which illustrates the New Guineas gone through rapid changes in 50 years, then that poses a question. And then the rest of the book, in the case of The World Until Yesterday, the rest of the book looks at studies that anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists have carried out in 39 societies around the world on all the continents, and they’ve gathered data and published papers and published books. That’s the factual basis of the book, but the book is then laced with these stories about the New Guineans outclassing the MBAs from overseas.
35:30 Brian Rose: Yeah, I love them, because it really draws you into the numbers, because I think you can get, unless you’re an academic, that the numbers can gloss over a lot of people. Do you like television? I remember the Guns, Germs and Steel short series that you did many, many years ago and it was a scene. I remember where you were getting emotional and crying and I was just curious if you liked that experience or if you didn’t like it.
35:54 Jared Diamond: I liked the experience of making films.
35:56 I made two films with National Geographic. National Geographic and PBS made a film on my book Guns, Germs and Steel And the film was aired on PBS, and the DVD is available and it’s done rather well. And then National Geographic Channel itself made a film on my next book, Collapse, so you can do those films. I learned from making those films. Again, I was naive at the beginning.
36:25 I thought, so Guns, German Seal is book 500 pages long of 300,000 words. The film, they told me, is gonna be three hours. I can talk at the rate of about 100 words per minute. So three hours, that’s 6,000 words per hour. So my 300,000-word book has got to get squeezed out to 18,000 words.
36:48 How naive and ignorant I was. No, in television, you do not talk for an hour. In television, I was not permitted to talk for more than eight sentences. I had to summarize the origins of agriculture eight sentences, but I wasn’t summarizing this sitting at a desk. I was summarizing it on camera in Spain, sitting in a pigsty with a big pig, whom I was attracting by acorns, and there was the sun outside, and there was the sheep. So I lived in my eight lines, but I burbled the last lines, so they said, say it again. So I said it again, and I got all the lines right, but the pig missed his cues, and the pig came too close to me, and I got scared and pulled back.
37:33 So I did it again, and I got it right, and the pig got it right. But then the clouds came over, the sun, so the light was wrong. And then the light was right, and I got it right, and the pigs were right, and the acorns were right. But the sheep wanted to buy it at the wrong moment. So it took about eight takes.
37:50 I had eight sentences to explain the origins of agriculture, but we had to go through it eight times.
37:56 Brian Rose: OK, so you have a love-hate relationship with television?
37:59 Jared Diamond: No, I had a love relationship. There was no hate at all. I had to learn to do it differently.
38:04 Brian Rose: Okay. I remember when I first saw that bit and then I was so happy to see you on television. I was like, yes, yes. And then they put it together and then they put the crying thing in. I was like, Jared’s never gonna do television again.
38:15 I was just like, he must be not happy with that.
38:18 Jared Diamond: I was so happy that I went ahead and then did television on my next book, Collapse.
38:23 Brian Rose: Collapse, yeah, I’ve watched it since.
38:26 Jared Diamond: I’ve done lots of television. Recently I did a Japanese television program in a Korean television program.
38:32 So yeah, I like doing, it’s a challenge. It’s a, writing a book is a challenge and doing television is a challenge. And it takes different, different talents and different ways of doing things to write a book and to do television.
38:45 Brian Rose: As a writer, how important is it these days to get out there, do the media tours? You know, these days people have video trailers for their books.
38:54 You know, you’re doing television kind of seems like hand in hand with your works. Yeah, how important is it?
39:00 Jared Diamond: Well, a couple of things. One, if you want to sell your books, if you want people to buy your books, it helps to go around talking about the book because someone may not lay out nine pounds for a book that they know nothing about. But if they’ve heard me give an entertaining talk, they’re more likely to lay out nine pounds for the book.
39:19 So that’s one thing. And the other thing is that when I give a talk about a book, I know what I’m going to say. But I don’t know the questions that people are going to ask. And people, like last night and the night before last, I talked about my book here in the UK. And people ask really thought-provoking questions, which sometimes end up as my next book.
39:42 Brian Rose: Wow. And you’re already thinking about your next book?
39:45 Jared Diamond: I’m not only am I already thinking about it. I’ve already drawn up a proposal. I’ve submitted it to editors.
39:52 We’ve signed some contracts. I have a 35-page detailed proposal. And I’ve already got a plan for what I have to do in the next four years to write the book.
40:03 Brian Rose: Jared, you’re no spring check-in. How old are you?
40:06 Jared Diamond: 70s. I was 76 three weeks ago.
40:08 Brian Rose: You’re an inspiration to us young folks. Do you slow down? Have you slowed down in your older age?
40:16 It doesn’t seem like you have.
40:18 Jared Diamond: Yes, I have slowed down. I used to run. I used to be able to do, my best smile time was a little over six minutes. I’ve now had a hip replacement operation, so my running days are over.
40:33 Climbing mountains in New Guinea, I used to be able to go up a 6,000 foot mountain and come back down in a single day. On my most recent trip this March, I got up 1,000 feet and back down, and I said, Jared, this is really terrible. Thousand feet up and down in a day you used to do 6,000 feet up and down, but I’m older So I’m not gonna bash myself and you’re still climbing I’m still going up and down more slowly and I’m still watching birds and and as for my bird watching So I’ve lost some of my high-pitched hearing and I’m not as good a bird watcher as I used to be But on the hand, I have a lot more experience I’ve been listening to the news these New Guinea birds for 50 years. So although I can no longer hear the of the red cat flower pecker.
41:22 I really know how to teleport the calls of those 15 species of green fruit pigeons that someone with less experience in New Guinea cannot teleport.
41:30 Brian Rose: OK, so you’re using your experience to fill in for the physical attrition. What’s your, there’s been a few critics of this book that have said that you haven’t cited specific people in the book. And you had written an article from The New Yorker called Vengeance Is Ours, I think in 08. and there was some indigenous people in Papua New Guinea involved, and we don’t know what happened there.
41:52 Is this something that you made a conscious choice not to cite specific individuals because of things in the past, or is that completely wrong?
42:02 Jared Diamond: Among anthropologists now, anthropologists have changed their own views over the last several decades about whether you should mention indigenous peoples by name, indigenous people by name. If I were writing a story about the UK, I would be obliged to name the people, unless there was some compelling reason not to do so, so that some other reporter could then go interview that person and see whether what I said about that person was truthful.
42:32 And that was also the rule, the expectation anthropology a few decades ago. But anthropologists gradually realized that the relationship between a reporter and an interviewed subject in the UK is different from the relationship between an interviewing anthropologist and a New Guinean, because the New Guinean does not have the world perspective. It’s relatively easy for the traditional person to be exploited and misused by the interviewer and not have the context for which the interview will be used.
43:06 And so over the last several decades, anthropologists have changed their ethics. And the view now is that you should not mention indigenous people by name, that makes it then impossible for some other person to come in and interview that person, but what some other person can do is to come in and interview some other person. So even if they can’t interview my particular subject, they can interview someone else and see whether what I said is basically true.
43:35 So the ethics and anthropology have changed, but also the ethics and as a result the ethics with which I write my books have changed. I used to name the New Guineans that I work with nowadays in fairness to them so that they will not get misused. I don’t name them.
43:49 Brian Rose: And is there a lawsuit issue if you name them that this person said this? Is that an issue now that you probably didn’t have to deal with 40 years ago when it comes to quoting New Guineans?
43:59 Jared Diamond: That’s true. It’s not just New Guineans, but traditional people generally. The requirement 40 years ago was that anthropologists named their subjects. So that’s just as in the UK. Some other scholar can go in and find that subject and interview that subject.
44:16 But the power relationships are different. If I’m interviewing someone on the streets of London, both of us come from the same society. The person understands better where I’m coming from. Whereas if I’m interviewing, or if an anthropologist is interviewing an Amazonian Indian, then it’s easy for someone else to come in and misuse that, get that Amazonian Indian into trouble. And so that’s why the ethics code has changed.
44:46 Brian Rose: Okay, are you a celebrity in P&G? In P&G?
44:49 Jared Diamond: Yeah, lots of New Guineans know about my books and they know about my bird writing.
44:55 Brian Rose: Does that make it difficult to, say, conduct an interview or observe sometimes if people know you?
45:01 Jared Diamond: No, it really doesn’t.
45:03 Because when the usual European comes into New Guinea, let me tell you what a New Guinea friend of mine said about anthropologists. The New Guinea friend of mine said, so an anthropologist came and lived in our village. And he began asking us all sorts of questions. He asked, who you marry? And then he asked, who do you sleep with?
45:29 And who do you sleep with other than the person that you marry, and how much did you pay for your wife, and are you going to stay married to your wife? And then the New Guinean said, those are nosy questions. We don’t want to deal with that person. So for an anthropologist, or for a geologist, a geologist comes into a village and asks the people about stones, why on earth? And asks them about some black stuff coming out of the ground.
45:58 Why does that need to care about black stuff, namely oil coming out of the ground? whereas I come in there and I start imitating birds. And they understand, oh, that’s the bird that you mean. So they can understand. They share my interests.
46:12 And so it’s easy for me, then, for most outsiders to have a good rapport with New Guineans because they can understand why I’m interested in this stuff. Of course you’re interested in birds. We’re interested in birds.
46:25 Brian Rose: OK, it’s good for building a rapport. Yeah.
46:27 What’s your next book?
46:29 Jared Diamond: The next book is about nations and individuals going through crises. Countries go through change. When I was living in the UK, 58 to 62, Britain was going through change then as a result of the winding down of the empire and the winding down of the fleet in Suez. So Britain has undergone a lot of change in the last 50 years.
46:54 The US is facing a growing crisis now. Japan underwent big change in the 1800s, and Japan has issues today. Many countries have undergone change. So my next book is about, first of all, how individuals deal with individual life crises, say you get divorced or you get deserted, or you get sick or your mother dies, provokes a life crisis. it turns out that many of the things that predict whether or not an individual will succeed in working through a life crisis also predict whether or not a nation is going to work through a national crisis so my next book will mostly be about national crises but will begin with individual crises.
47:39 Brian Rose: And focusing on specific countries?
47:42 Jared Diamond: Yes, it will include, it will certainly include the US, it will include the UK, It will include Japan, it will include Germany. I’m thinking of including a South American country, I’m thinking of including an Asian country. I’ll probably have Australia in there. There’ll be maybe about eight different countries.
48:03 Brian Rose: Will New Guinea be in there?
48:05 Jared Diamond: My present plan is not to have New Guinea in there. This book, the focus is on nations. But Eastern New Guinea has been a nation only since 1975. And I’m interested in nations with a long track record. OK.
48:25 Brian Rose: How do you write?
48:27 Jared Diamond: How do I write? I write with yellow paper and pencil and pen. You really do. I then have a little tape recorder.
48:38 I scribble over my first draft, and then I dictate it into the tape recorder. My secretary types it up. I take her typescript and I edit the typescript. Manually, manually. No computers.
48:49 I don’t know how to turn the bloody thing around.
48:52 Brian Rose: A lot of writers like that. And are you constantly writing on this trip, where you get ideas in the hotel room or on the plane? Or do you have a ritual that a lot of writers have where you wake up in the morning and you try to get 500 words done, that kind of thing?
49:07 Jared Diamond: I do not have a ritual.
49:08 The great German novelist Thomas Mann had a ritual. When he got up each day, he said, I’m going to write 500 words per day, and I’ll keep writing until I’ve written my 500 words. If it was an easy passage, he would be through in an hour, and then he would play for the rest of the day. If it was a difficult passage, he would be struggling with it for 24 hours into the next day. I don’t operate that way.
49:32 I write whenever the opportunity comes. Tomorrow I will be on an airplane from Britain to New York, And I already have a plan for, I’m gonna try to write a short article of about 3,000 words on the airplane, because I have this, what, 10-hour flight and nothing to do on the flight except write a 3,000-word article.
49:55 Brian Rose: Okay. Who do you read? Who are your favorite authors?
49:59 Jared Diamond: Nowadays, my reading is of two sorts. I read background material for my next book, whatever that is, and that tends to be historical accounts of people. You could say technical books. So at the moment, I’m just about to begin a biography in German of the former prosecutor for the German state of Hessen Fritz Bauer, who was in the 1960s, the German who initiated lawsuits by Germans themselves against German Nazis. And that’s going to be a part of my next book.
50:43 So that’s a book that I’m about to read, but also because I love learning languages, I’ve been learning Italian for the last 12 years. Every day I spend about an hour reading Italian and also on the airplane. I have a book with me written by an Italian, it’s in Italian, by an Italian historian about the use of gas by Mussolini in the war against Ethiopia in 1935, 36. It’s not well known, but this Italian historian went through the archives, the Italian government hated him for it, but he then wrote a book called I gas the Mussolini, Mussolini’s gas.
51:21 So I’m going to read, spend an hour reading that also to practice my Italian tomorrow.
51:26 Brian Rose: It’s interesting because it’s in the news now with what happened in Syria. And I think the New York Times did a history of gassing and why it’s such a red flag for us as humans, because if you look at the percentage of people killed by gas over the last 100 years, it’s quite small. But it’s those attacks that seem to make us really outraged. I mean, it’s been said that the biggest weapon of mass destruction is the AK-47, but it’s those big nuclear weapons and gas, lethal gases that really get everyone upset when it comes to humans.
51:56 And they were walking through, yeah, that Mussolini incident and some other things that happened in the past 100 years. How important is it in the days of Google Translate, where anybody can take that book and translate it into English online in a matter of seconds, how important is it for you to know the Italian and read it in the original text?
52:22 Jared Diamond: Oh, the books that I read in Italian, well, Well, first of all, most of them have not been translated. Modern Italian literature, much of it has been translated, but modern Italian literature is wonderful in Italian for the same reason that Shakespeare is wonderful in Italian.
52:42 Shakespeare has been translated into many languages, and the German translation of Shakespeare is particularly good, But to be you are not to be that is the question Shakespeare said it well And I’d rather read Shakespeare in English and I’d rather read prima levi in Italian and around read Thomas Mahon in German
53:01 Brian Rose: Okay, what’s that? What do you love most about the UK? And what do you hate most about the UK?
53:07 Jared Diamond: Well, what do I love most about? the UK um That’s like saying which of my wife’s ten fingers do I love most?
53:13 There are lots of wonderful things in the UK, the cultural opportunities of London, the beauty of the British countryside, what would be the term, the flexibility of the British people who dealt with World War II and dealt with post-World War II. I guess what I most love about the UK is my British friends, people that I met 55 years ago on this trip to the UK. I’ve had already a dinner with a friend that I met 55 years ago and tonight I’ll have dinner with another friend that I met 55 years ago and two nights ago I had lunch with a friend whom I knew 53 years ago and I haven’t seen her in 53 years.
54:04 The most wonderful thing about the U.K. is, for me, is these long friendships.
54:08 Brian Rose: Okay. And what don’t you like about it here?
54:10 Jared Diamond: Well, don’t I like about the U.K.?
54:12 The fact that it’s the country in which my wife and children do not live, and I like to be in the country where my wife and children do live. Well, the United States has some of it. The United States has advantages. California is a beautiful place to live. When I look in the Los Angeles Times on Monday and read the weather report, the says, what the weather will be like Friday afternoon, and it’s true, where it’s in London.
54:39 If you read Monday morning, what the weather will be like Monday afternoon, you know it’s a big lie. Who knows what it’s going to be?
54:46 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m from San Diego, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. It must have been quite a culture shock when you moved from Boston to LA in what, mid-60s or late-60s?
54:56 Jared Diamond: I moved to LA in 1966.
54:57 It was not such a big culture shock because I’d been a couple of times to California. I knew why I wanted to move to California, because of the predictable weather, because in Boston the weather report at 9 a.m. has no validity for 11 a.m. I wanted predictable weather, I wanted the mountains, the deserts, the islands. I wanted the University of California system, the best public university system in the United States.
55:27 I moved to California for reasons, and those reasons I knew in advance, and they were good reasons.
55:34 Brian Rose: finish up with a couple of very London Real questions and so bear with me here if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Jared Diamond and have a conversation with him and maybe give that young man a bit of advice what would you tell him
55:52 Jared Diamond: I would tell him in 20 year old Jared Diamond you’re all wrapped up now in what you’re gonna do for the next few years but the statistical odds are that you will live to age 90 so this is not too early to be thinking about what you can be doing not just next year but also 50 years from now and plan for it
56:13 Brian Rose: okay that’s good advice on that same note what’s the best advice you’ve ever received
56:19 Jared Diamond: I’ve well there’s competition for that one of the best pieces of advice that I ever received was from from my parents my first year in the UK doing research, the research was not going well and I was seriously considering dropping out of science and becoming a linguist, becoming a translator. I remember sitting on a park bench in Paris with my parents and I was really churned up with whether to remain in science and at the end of an hour’s discussion my father said, well, you’ve been trying at science for a year, it’s just a year, keep at it for another half year and see how it goes and if you don’t like it after a year and a half, then switch. And I kept at it for another half year and the
57:09 Experiment started to go well. So I remained in science instead of becoming a simultaneous translator with the UN, which I would not have been well qualified for. So that was perhaps the best single piece of advice I got.
57:22 Brian Rose: You said there was compete competition for that as well.
57:25 Jared Diamond: Well, gosh, what else?
57:26 The suggestion by the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Meyer when I was looking for a Place to study birds. He suggested, New Guinea. That was great advice a piece of advice that I did not follow when I was with the New Guinean in the jungle and and walking on a rough jungle trail and I was stumbling on the trail in my boots and the New Guinean was walking barefoot and the New Guinean said to me, throw away your boots, walk barefoot and you and I walk about strong one time, me fella.
58:01 If you just get rid of your boots and walk barefoot, you can walk strong like us. I didn’t follow that advice.
58:08 Brian Rose: I thought that some of the best advice you might have received would have been from the New Guineans.
58:14 Jared Diamond: Well, alright, there’s been advice from New Guineans about thinking clearly about danger. That’s to say, thinking about the things that you’re going to do every day and he likes sleeping under a tree.
58:26 New Guineans are very careful not to sleep under a dead tree because if you sleep under a dead tree, the chances are a thousand to one that won’t fall down that particular night and kill you, but if you’re going to sleep in the jungle for three years, 365 days a year, that’s what’s that, 1,095 days, and every night you sleep under a dead tree and the chances of 1,000, you’ll be dead within three years. That really influenced me, and as a result, I’m very careful taking showers, and many my friends, not a friend of 63, whom I met 63 years ago, whom I was going to visit in New York on the way back, I just got the message that she fell in her house and broke her femur, so I’m not probably not going to see her. So a valuable thing that I learned from New Guinean is don’t obsess about terrorists and plane crashes.
59:17 Think about the things that you’re going to do every day and if you’re not careful they’ll catch up with you like taking showers.
59:24 Brian Rose: Yeah I would think that’s one of the benefits of spending time with those people. You get to see what’s what’s very important right now and in the present. The last bit of that question is is to the 20 year old listening right now what what is your advice to them, you know, if they want to become, you know, Pulitzer Prize winning authors, or they want to have, say, a career similar to yours, what advice do you give them?
59:45 Jared Diamond: Wow. People often ask me, particularly young people ask me what to do so that they can pursue broad interests and write synthesizing different fields, not just being a linguist, not not just being a geneticist, but as I do, pulling together linguistics, genetics, plant domestication, animal behavior. And for young people going into academia, my advice is specialize and get tenure first and a permanent job first and only then broaden out because sadly in academia, although one talks about being interdisciplinary, the reality is that people who are interdisciplinary are often either resented or envied, and so you’d better not be interdisciplinary until you’ve got a secure job.
1:00:43 Brian Rose: Okay, you’re a bit of anomaly with your polymath, I mean, with the fact that you cover so many different fields. There’s not a lot of people like you that do that.
1:00:55 Jared Diamond: That’s true. It’s, I don’t know someone else who was the world expert on the gallbladder and also on New Guinea birds and then got into an environmental history. I’ve been fortunate at the University of California Los Angeles UCLA to have very supportive deans, very supportive department chairmen, chairmen and chairwomen, supportive colleagues who have not only tolerated but supported by doing different things.
1:01:24 Brian Rose: But in your advice is to pick a specialty really to kind of unfortunate pick a specialty Get a job for life and once you’ve got the job for life you do whatever you want. Yeah, it’s interesting I was in the finance industry for about ten years and when I got out I was kind of preaching not to go in there But I do see the value sometimes of picking a trade or profession and and learning through that before you kind of diversify I think even even a lot of people that film and direct and act I think they started off with kind of one discipline and then kind of split out
1:01:56 Jared Diamond: We could have another conversation some time about what I’ve learned from hedge fund managers who include some good friends My son is now working for for a hedge fund and conversely about the advice that I’ve given to hedge fund managers But that’s a whole other side.
1:02:11 Brian Rose: All right. Well next time you’re in London. We’ll have to have that discussion Will there be television movies associated with this book or for you in the future?
1:02:20 Will there be more in the terms of visual arts there? There’s a
1:02:24 Jared Diamond: There’s a movie that was made in Japan that I believe is coming out in Japan Canada and New Zealand and whether there’s a movie on this book depends upon whether some enterprising filmmaker sees a way to turn this book into a great film just as Other filmmakers turned guns German steel collapse into good films
1:02:41 Brian Rose: Okay, so you’re open ears if someone’s listening and they have an idea for the film they should get in touch with you
1:02:48 Jared Diamond: pitch it to me
1:02:48 Brian Rose: Okay, cool I was watching you on collapse and I really I really love the the that that filming of you and just having you there makes a big Difference because I I kind of forwarded through and I didn’t know if you were gonna be in there And yeah, it adds a lot of credibility when when you are interviewed in and make a few statements there How can people get a hold of the book and how can people follow what’s going on with you people can get get hold of?
1:03:14 Jared Diamond: Book because it’s on sale in better bookstores everywhere in English-speaking countries. It’s already come out in Germany, it’s coming out in the next week or so in France and Spain, it’s already out in Japan and Korea. So you can get it through bookstores, you can get it through the usual outlets. And as for following me, I have my own website, which I think is called Jaradiamond.org. I believe it’s jarradiamond.org, and on my website, I’ve posted stuff about me, and I’ve written things, including about my books.
1:03:50 Brian Rose: Okay, but you don’t turn on computers. No iPads, no…
1:03:54 Jared Diamond: No, let me show you something. I am carrying now a Nokia cell phone, and three consecutive people in Britain have attempted to show me how to turn the thing on, but it is complicated, and I have not mastered
1:04:09 Brian Rose: A man as worldly as yourself Jared, I thought you might jump in and try to attack the technology But do you find that you haven’t missed anything by not being plugged in
1:04:21 Jared Diamond: too difficult too difficult?
1:04:23 Brian Rose: All right. There’s something I respect about that very much. So all right fantastic. I can they get this online I’m guessing at the Amazons and the different booksellers Probably get the book online. Yeah.
1:04:33 Jared Diamond: Yeah, you can get it You can get it on the usual online outlets and you can get it in good bookstores.
1:04:38 Brian Rose: Okay, fantastic Well, I’ve started it and I got through some of it, but I’m gonna take the next couple weeks and dive back into this You know, it took me a while to read the guns germs and steel But you saved my vacation that long Christmas vacation on the Uruguayan Beach with your book So thank you so much for that
1:04:54 Jared Diamond: I’m glad that my book was able to out compete a beautiful blonde and don’t feel that you need several weeks There are people who’ve read my books in in two nights at the expense of a beautiful blonde
1:05:04 Brian Rose: really I know she’s gonna kill me when she hears this but that that was the story I had to tell you about.
1:05:09 So thanks so much for being here. I think my father, who lives in San Diego, is going to be jealous. I think a lot of, I don’t know if your readership is heavily male or not. I’m not sure.
1:05:22 Jared Diamond: My readership goes down to children.
1:05:24 My sons were forced to read my book in the seventh grade. I have no reason to believe that my, I don’t know whether my readership is predominantly male or female, as far as I know it’s a mixture.
1:05:34 Brian Rose: OK, well, I’ve mentioned you to a few people, people definitely seem to know who you are, so people are very jealous of me. Thank you so much for your time. I know you’ve been on a whirlwind media tour, so it’s fantastic talking to you, Jared, and yeah, please look us up next time you’re in the UK.
1:05:48 Jared Diamond: I would love for you to tell me what hedge funds are doing wrong based on what you’ve learned in New Guinea. Thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure to be with you.
