Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is one of the most celebrated scientists and public intellectuals of the past half-century — a Pulitzer Prize winner, National Medal of Science recipient, and Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), whose interdisciplinary mind has reshaped how the world thinks about civilization, human societies, and long-run survival. Trained as a physiologist and evolutionary biologist, Diamond has spent decades conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, where his observations on bird ecology, linguistics, and human societies formed the empirical foundation for some of the most widely read nonfiction works of modern times.

Science speaker Jared Diamond is best known for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and became a landmark work in the literature of world history. The book offers a sweeping answer to one of civilization’s oldest questions: why did some societies come to dominate others? Diamond’s answer — rooted in geography, agriculture, and the diffusion of technology rather than racial or cultural superiority — challenged prevailing narratives and offered leaders, policymakers, and organizations a new framework for thinking about competitive advantage, resilience, and long-term institutional design.

His subsequent major works extended this inquiry in powerful directions. The Third Chimpanzee (1991) examined the evolutionary origins of human uniqueness; Why Is Sex Fun? (1997) explored the biology of human reproduction through a comparative lens; and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) became essential reading for executives and policymakers grappling with environmental sustainability and organizational fragility. His book The World Until Yesterday (2012), drawing on his decades in New Guinea, examined what modern institutions can learn from traditional societies.

Interdisciplinary Authority at the Intersection of Science, History, and Strategy

Diamond’s career spans ornithology, anthropology, ecology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology — a range of expertise that positions him uniquely to address the deepest questions of institutional resilience and societal design. He holds fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, and the Cosmos Prize, among many others. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and have collectively sold millions of copies worldwide. His full academic profile and research are available at the UCLA Department of Geography.

As a science speaker, Jared Diamond brings extraordinary analytical depth and narrative power to stages worldwide. Drawing on a career that spans laboratory research and decades of remote fieldwork, he challenges audiences to think beyond short-term cycles and examine the structural forces — geographic, biological, environmental, institutional — that determine whether societies and organizations flourish or fail. His talks equip senior leaders with a long-lens framework for strategy, sustainability, and decision-making under uncertainty, and leave audiences with a fundamentally richer understanding of why the world is the way it is — and what can be done about it. He is represented by Aurum Speakers Bureau.