Hello, my name is David Ronseman and this is Talking Politics. Today I'm talking to Jared

Darmund, who's the author of some of the most globally influential books of the last few

decades, including Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. And today we're going to be talking

about Upheaval, which is a story of nations in crisis.

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Jared, the setup for this book is one that I've myself thought about a lot recently,

which is how you can draw analogies between personal crises, crises that individual

human beings have and most of us have experience of and the crises that before nations. I've

written and I've talked to them this podcast about the possibility that America or American

democracy is going through a midlife crisis. And that thought, I don't know where it came

from, I guess, because I'm in the middle of my life too. As it were, once I thought it,

I couldn't unthink it. I sort of started to see it everywhere. Did this idea come to

you or is it something you think that probably in the background, you've always instinctively

felt that you can draw these analogies between the life of a human being and the life of

a nation?

No, the idea came to me very specifically because my wife Marie is a clinical psychologist

who in the first year of our marriage was doing a specialty training in the year of psychotherapy

called crisis therapy, which is not the usual several years to explore life issues, but

consists of helping someone in a crisis. All of us go through them. Personal crises break

...