Have you ever wondered what a sandwich sounds like?

Not much to it, is there?

Unless, of course, it's a Walker's sandwich.

Mmm, that is good.

Now that's what Asani should sound like.

Go all crisp in with walkers.

Delicious.

Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Imagine yourself a German citizen the day after the end of World War II.

Much of your city is bombed to ruins.

A good part of the population is dead.

The Nazi ideology that has dominated your nation for the past decade has been repudiated

as definitively as Bambi in Bambi meets Godzilla. Basically, it's the end of the world.

Now consider Berlin today. It's the biggest economy in Europe, the center of the European Union,

a progressive welfare state where the old racial and nationalist resentments have been

reduced to fringe movements, still disturbingly present, but by no means mainstream.

How do you get here from there? And could the pendulum ever swing back again? This is the subject

of Jared Diamond's new book, Upheaval. In it,

the geographer, historian, and author of Guns, germs, and Steel, among many other books,

looks to human crisis counseling for a model of how nations deal with crises, both acute

and gradual. For Americans like myself, troubled in this historical moment by dreams of the

late Roman Empire,

...