With the recent publication of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a major international bestseller, Diamond's ideas are reaching an even widener audience than the million-plus readers of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Collapse inspired an international museum exhibit that recently toured North America, meanwhile a 3-part national television special on Guns, Germs, and Steel aired on PBS. Diamond's lectures tackle the giant questions: why do some societies thrive and prosper while others shrivel and die? How can humanity maximize the opportunity for human happiness while saving the planet from ecological ruin and collapse? Are there lessons we can learn from other great civilizations that have grown to world dominance?

Huge crowds attend his talks and are testament both to his reputation as a great speaker and his ability to spellbind an audience. Currently a professor of Geography at UCLA, he is the author of two other best-selling books, The Third Chimpanzee and Why Is Sex Fun? He has received some of the most prestigious awards the world has to offer, including a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, The Conservation Medals of the Zoological Society of San Diego, The Carr Medal, the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and Japan's International Cosmos Prize. In 2000 he was awarded the USA's highest civilian scientific award, The National Medal of Science, for his landmark research and breakthrough discoveries in evolutionary biology. .

The ruined cities, temples, and statues of history's great, vanished societies (Easter Island, Anasazi, the Lowland Maya, Angkor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and many more) are the birthplace of endless romantic mysteries. But these disappearances offer more than idle conjecture: the social collapses were due in part to the types of environmental problems that beset us today.

Yet many societies facing similar problems do not collapse. What makes certain societies especially vulnerable? Why didn't their leaders perceive and solve their environmental problems? What can we learn from their fates, and what can we do differently today to help us avoid their fates?

Dr. Jared Diamond's blockbuster bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel won him a Pulitzer Prize and a place as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. His lecture of the same name takes audiences on an intellectual odyssey that challenges our assumptions about the rise and fall of civilizations. Dr. Diamond asks and answers a very simple question: Why did Europeans and Asians conquer the indigenous peoples of Africa, the New World, Australia and the South Pacific, instead of being conquered themselves?

The answer touches on technology, genetics, genocide, zebras, pestilence, weather, geography, and luck. It also unconditionally refutes racist dogma that claims biological superiority for Eurasians. Geographical accidents, not intelligence, seem to be the reasons for Eurasia's success. Audiences will walk away with profound insights into how we got where we are and what this may mean for where we are going. Entering an intellectual maelstrom, they will be discussing and debating these ideas for months to come.

Until September 11th of 2001, we equated globalization mostly with 'us' sending 'them' our modern accomplishments: the Internet and Coca-Cola. Now, we are painfully aware of the unpredictable and reciprocal nature of global contact: AIDS, terrorism, unstoppable illegal immigration and diabetes epidemics. What will globalization really bring the world, and how can we minimize its negative impact while continuing to benefit from the advantages of shared cultures and resources?

Globalization means that remote societies can no longer collapse without influencing the rest of the world (as with Easter Island and the Anasazi societies of many centuries ago,) and we are the first society in history with the chance to develop using a comprehensive contemporary and historical understanding of our collective path.