jared diamond joins me now from our studios in los angeles welcome. how are you i am i am well thank you i hope the same is true of you you brilliantly flaky you brilliantly merge science and culture in a way that the average person can understand is reading your reading or writing what stimulated your earliest interest in these areas. preps the different interests of my parents. was a pianist she was also a great linguist and a teacher and i got my look of writing from her my father was a physician and a experimenter so i got my local science from him but i began birdwatching when i was seven years old and then i grew up during world war two with maps of europe in the pacific on the wall on pins to show the changes in battle and so i became interested early and saw in some one hand and in writing in history in the humanities on the other hand it's an extraordinary synthesis and the breadth of your work is is remarkable your second book why sex is fun evolution of human sexuality seems in some ways out of sync with the rest of your books in some ways

conversations with great minds i'm speaking with brilliant scientists best selling award winning author jared diamond whose books include guns germs and steel and collapse how societies choose to fail or succeed welcome back dr doctor to dr diamond. in guns germs and steel we were just talking about this this dimension of guns germs and steel and how those things have. brought about the collapse of societies and that this triad gave your asians. an advantage is there are there other examples of the same thing in other human societies around the world asian societies for example south american societies yet free os showing up at european shona. they were examples all around the world on the one hand of europeans defeating european peoples but there were also examples of non european peoples defeating european peoples for example fall is that that. most of the people saw their couture real africa today. african black farmers speaking bantu languages two thousand years ago that wasn't the case just as two thousand years ago everybody in north america was a native american two thousand years ago everybod