Podcasts about americas before columbus

Guest Federico Mena Quintero Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes In this special Maintainer Month episode of Sustain, host Richard Littauer chats with Federico Mena Quintero, a foundational GNOME hacker and board member. Federico shares his journey from learning image processing in high school, becoming a key contributor to the GIMP project, and founding the GNOME desktop environment. He discusses the historical context, challenges, and achievements of GNOME and open source development. The conversation delves into the importance of maintaining infrastructural software, adapting to new technologies like the Rust programming language, and the socio-economic factors influencing the open source community's demographics. Press download now to hear more! [00:01:29] Federico describes GNOME as the “surface of your desk”- the visual and interactive layer of the Linux desktop. [00:02:16] Federico started writing image processing programs in high school and discovered GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and began contributing plugins. Encouraged by positive feedback, he continued developing filters and building community resources. [00:10:20] The proprietary Motif GUI toolkit used by GIMP prompted the creation of GTK (GIMP Toolkit), a free alternative. GTK was split from GIMP and became a foundation for GNOME. Miguel de Icaza learned about modular component design from Microsoft and brought those ideas to the GNOME team. [00:14:48] Federico explains KDE was already launched but used the non-free Qt toolkit and GNOME was created as a fully free alternative using GTK. [00:17:58] They discuss GNOME's long-term success which has thousands of contributors and institutional backing from its foundation. [00:21:06] Federico reflects on his privilege. He never had to apply for his first job because he was recruited and recognizes the barriers to entry for underrepresented communities. [00:24:32] The conversation turns to global south and diversity. Federico discusses the limitations on who can participate in open source due to time, money, and societal roles, and notes that women and people outside the Global North often face greater barriers. [00:30:37] Richard inquires what Federico means by “maintaining infrastructure.” He explains that open source today is less about new features and more about keeping infrastructure working. [00:32:59] Federico talks about a recent project to replace a vital but abandoned infrastructure component and emphasizes the need for sustainable maintenance strategies. [00:36:25] Federico became maintainer of Librsvg image rendering library from C to Rust. [00:40:00] Find out where you can follow Federico on the web. Quotes [00:31:10] “Software doesn't rot, but the environment around it changes.” Spotlight [00:40:57] Richard's spotlight is the book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. [00:41:49] Federico's spotlight is two books: Malintzin's Choices and James. Links SustainOSS (https://sustainoss.org/) podcast@sustainoss.org (mailto:podcast@sustainoss.org) richard@sustainoss.org (mailto:richard@sustainoss.org) SustainOSS Discourse (https://discourse.sustainoss.org/) SustainOSS Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/tags/sustainoss) SustainOSS Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/sustainoss.bsky.social) SustainOSS LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sustainoss/) Open Collective-SustainOSS (Contribute) (https://opencollective.com/sustainoss) Richard Littauer Socials (https://www.burntfen.com/2023-05-30/socials) Federico Mena Quintero Blog (https://viruta.org/) Federico Mena Quintero Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@federicomena@mstdn.mx) GNOME (https://www.gnome.org/) GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) (https://www.gimp.org/) GTK (https://www.gtk.org/) Librsvg (https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg) 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491%3A_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus) La Malinche (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Malinche) Malintzin's Choices by Camila Townsend (https://archive.org/details/malintzinschoice0000town) James by Percival Everett (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_(novel)) Credits Produced by Richard Littauer (https://www.burntfen.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by DeAnn Bahr Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Special Guest: Federico Mena Quintero.

In the 1960s, a deep anxiety set in as one thing became seemingly clear: We were headed toward population catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich's “The Population Bomb” and “The Limits to Growth,” written by the Club of Rome, were just two publications warning of impending starvation due to simply too many humans on the earth.As the population ballooned year by year, it would simply be impossible to feed everyone. Demographers and environmentalists alike held their breath and braced for impact.Except that we didn't starve. On the contrary, we were better fed than ever.In his article in The New Atlantis, Charles C. Mann explains that agricultural innovation — from improved fertilization and irrigation to genetic modification — has brought global hunger to a record low.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Mann about the agricultural history they didn't teach you in school.Mann is a science journalist who has worked as a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired magazines, and whose work has been featured in many other major publications. He is also the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, as well as The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World.In This Episode* Intro to the Agricultural Revolution (2:04)* Water infrastructure (13:11)* Feeding the masses (18:20)* Indigenous America (25:20)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Intro to the Agricultural Revolution (2:04)I don't think that people realize that the fact that most people on earth, almost the average person on earth, can feed themselves is a novel phenomenon. It's something that basically wasn't true since as far back as we know.Pethokoukis: What got my attention was a couple of pieces that you've worked on for The New Atlantis magazine looking at the issue of how modern Americans take for granted the remarkable systems and infrastructure that provide us comfort, safety, and a sense of luxury that would've been utterly unimaginable even to the wealthiest people of a hundred years ago or 200 years ago.Let me start off by asking you: Does it matter that we do take that for granted and that we also kind of don't understand how our world works?Mann: I would say yes, very much. It matters because these systems undergird the prosperity that we have, the good fortune that we have to be alive now, but they're always one generation away from collapse. If they aren't maintained, upgraded and modernized, they'll fall apart. They just won't stand there. So we have to be aware of this. We have to keep our eye on the ball, otherwise we won't have these things.The second thing is that, if we don't know how our society works, as citizens, we're simply not going to make very good choices about what to do with that society. I feel like both sides in our current political divide are kind of taking their eye off the ball. It's important to have good roads, it's important to have clean water, it's important to have a functioning public health system, it's important to have an agricultural system that works. It doesn't really matter who you are. And if we don't keep these things going, life will be unnecessarily bad for a lot of people, and that's just crazy to do.Is this a more recent phenomenon? If I would've asked people 50 years ago, “Explain to me how our infrastructure functions, how we get water, how we get electricity,” would they have a better idea? Is it just because things are more complicated today that we have no idea how our food gets here or why when we turn the faucet, clean water comes out?The answer is “yes” in a sort of trivial sense, in that many more people were involved in producing food, a much greater percentage of the population was involved in producing food 50 years ago. The same thing was true for the people who were building infrastructure 50 years ago.But I also think it's generally true that people's parents saw the change and knew it. So that is very much the case and, in a sense, I think we're victims of our own success. These kinds of things have brought us so much prosperity that we can afford to do crazy things like become YouTube influencers, or podcasters, or freelance writers. You don't really have any connection with how the society goes because we're sort of surfing on this wave of luxury that our ancestors bequeathed to us.I don't know how much time you spend on social media, Charles — I'm sure I spend too much — but I certainly sense that many people today, younger people especially, don't have a sense of how someone lived 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and there was just a lot more physical suffering. And certainly, if you go back far enough, you could not take for granted that you would have tomatoes in your supermarket year round, that you would have water in the house and that water would be clean. What I found really interesting — you did a piece on food and a piece on water — in the food piece you note that, in the 1980s, that was a real turning point that the average person on earth had enough to eat all the time, and rather than becoming an issue of food production, it became an issue of distribution, of governance. I think most people would be surprised of that statistic even though it's 40 years old.I don't think that people realize that the fact that most people on earth, almost the average person on earth, can feed themselves is a novel phenomenon. It's something that basically wasn't true since as far back as we know. That's this enormous turning point, and there are many of these turning points. Obviously, the introduction of antibiotics for . . . public health, which is another one of these articles they're going to be working on . . .Just about 100 years ago today, when President Coolidge was [president], his son went to play tennis at the White House tennis courts, and because he was lazy, or it was fashionable, or something, he didn't put on socks. He got a blister on his toe, the toe got infected, and he died. 100 years ago, the president of the United States, who presumably had the best healthcare available to anybody in the world, was unable to save his beloved son when the son got a trivial blister that got infected. The change from that to now is mind boggling.You've written about the Agricultural Revolution and why the great fears 40 or 50 years ago of mass starvation didn't happen. I find that an endlessly interesting topic, both for its importance and for the fact it just seems to be so underappreciated to this day, even when it was sort of obvious to people who pay attention that something was happening, it still seemed not to penetrate the public consciousness. I wonder if you could just briefly talk to me about that revolution and how it happened.The question is, how did it go from “The Population Bomb” written in 1968, a huge bestseller, hugely influential, predicting that there is going to be hundreds of millions of people dying of mass starvation, followed by other equally impassioned, equally important warnings. There's one called “Famine, 1975!,” written a few years before, that predicted mass famines in 1975. There's “The Limits to Growth.” I went to college in the '70s and these were books that were on the curriculum, and they were regarded as contemporary classics, and they all proved to be wrong.The reason is that, although they were quite correct about the fact that the human race was reproducing at that time faster than ever before, they didn't realize two things: The first is that as societies get more affluent, and particularly as societies get more affluent and give women more opportunities, birth rates decline. So that this was obviously, if you looked at history, going to be a temporary phenomenon of whatever length it was be, but it was not going to be infinite.The second was there was this enormous effort spurred by this guy named Norman Borlaug, but with tons of other people involved, to take modern science and apply it to agriculture, and that included these sort of three waves of innovation. Now, most innovation is actually just doing older technologies better, which is a huge source of progress, and the first one was irrigation. Irrigation has been around since forever. It's almost always been done badly. It's almost always not been done systematically. People started doing it better. They still have a lot of problems with it, but it's way better, and now 40 percent, roughly, of the crops in the world that are produced are produced by irrigation.The second is the introduction of fertilizer. There's two German scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who essentially developed the ways of taking fertilizer and making lots and lots of it in factories. I could go into more detail if you want, but that's the essential thing. This had never been done before, and suddenly cheap industrial fertilizer became available all over the world, and Vaclav Smil . . . he's sort of an environmental scientist of every sort, in Manitoba has calculated that roughly 40 percent of the people on earth today would not be alive if it wasn't for that.And then the third was the development of much better, much higher-yielding seeds, and that was the part that Norman Borlaug had done. These packaged together of irrigation fertilizer and seeds yielded what's been called the Green Revolution, doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled grain yields across the world, particularly with wheat and rice. The result is the world we live in today. When I was growing up, when you were growing up, your parents may have said to you, as they did me, Oh, eat your vegetables, there are kids that are starving in Asia.” Right? That was what was told and that was the story that was told in books like “The Population Bomb,” and now Asia's our commercial rival. When you go to Bangkok, that was a place that was hungry and now it's gleaming skyscrapers and so forth. It's all based on this fact that people are able to feed themselves through the combination of these three factors,That story, the story of mass-starvation that the Green Revolution irrigation prevented from coming true. I think a surprising number of people still think that story is relevant today, just as some people still think the population will be exploding when it seems clear it probably will not be exploding. It will rise, but then it's going to start coming down at some point this century. I think those messages just don't get through. Just like most people don't know Norm Borlaug, the Haber-Bosch process, which school kids should know. They don't know any of this. . . Borlaug won the Nobel Prize, right?Right. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'll tell you a funny story —I think he won it in the same year that “The Population Bomb” came out.It was just a couple years off. But you're right, the central point is right, and the funny thing is . . . I wrote another book a while back that talked about this and about the way environmentalists think about the world, and it's called the “Wizard and the Prophet” and Borlaug was the wizard of it. I thought, when I proposed it, that it would be easy. He was such an important guy, there'd be tons of biographies about him. And to this day, there isn't a real serious scholarly biography of the guy. This is a person who has done arguably more to change human life than any other person in the 20th century, certainly up in the top dozen or so. There's not a single serious biography of him.How can that be?It's because we're tremendously disconnected. It's a symptom of what I'm talking about. We're tremendously disconnected from these systems, and it's too bad because they're interesting! They're actually quite interesting to figure out: How do you get water to eight billion people? How do you get . . . It is a huge challenge, and some of the smartest people you've ever met are working on it every day, but they're working on it over here, and the public attention is over here.Water infrastructure (13:11). . . the lack of decent, clean, fresh water is the world's worst immediate environmental problem. I think people probably have some vague idea about agriculture, the Agricultural Revolution, how farming has changed, but I think, as you just referred to, the second half, water — utter mystery to people. Comes out of a pipe. The challenges of doing that in a rich country are hard. The challenges doing a country not so rich, also hard. Tell me what you find interesting about that topic.Well, whereas the story about agriculture is basically a good story: We've gotten better at it. We have a whole bunch of technical innovations that came in the 20th century and humankind is better off than ever before. With water, too, we are better off than ever before, but the maddening thing is we could be really well off because the technology is basically extremely old.There's a city, a very ancient city called Mohenjo-daro that I write about a bit in this article that was in essentially on the Pakistan-India border, 2600 BC. And they had a fully functioning water system that, in its basics, was no different than the water system that we have, or that London has, or that Paris has. So this is an ancient, ancient technology, yet we still have two billion people on the planet that don't have access to adequate water. In fact, even though we know how to do it, the lack of decent, clean, fresh water is the world's worst immediate environmental problem. And a small thing that makes me nuts is that climate change — which is real and important — gets a lot of attention, but there are people dying of not getting good water now.On top of it, even in rich countries like us, our water system is antiquated. The great bulk of it was built in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, and, like any kind of physical system, it ages, and every couple years, various engineering bodies, water bodies, the EPA, and so forth puts out a report saying, “Hey, we really have to fix the US water system and the numbers keep mounting up.” And Democrats, Republicans, they all ignore this.Who is working on the water issue in poorer countries?There you have a very ad hoc group of people. The answer is part of it's the Food and Agricultural Organization because most water in most countries is used for irrigation to grow food. You also have the World Health Organization, these kinds of bodies. You have NGOs working on it. What you don't have in those countries like our country is the government taking responsibility for coordinating something that's obviously in the national interest.So you have these things where, very periodically — a government like China has done this, Jordan has done this, Bolivia has done this, countries all over the world have done this — and they say, “Okay, we haven't been able to provide freshwater. Let's bring in a private company.” And the private company then invests all this money in infrastructure, which is expensive. Then, because it's a private company, it has to make that money back, and so it charges people for a lot of money for this, and the people are very unhappy because suddenly they're paying a quarter of their income for water, which is what I saw in Southwest China: water riots because people are paying so much for water.In other words, one of the things that government can do is sort of spread these costs over everybody, but instead they concentrate it on the users, Almost universally, these privatization efforts have led to tremendous political unhappiness because the government has essentially shifted responsibility for coordinating and doing these things and imposed a cost on a narrow minority of the users.Are we finally getting on top of the old water infrastructure in this country? It seems like during the Biden administration they had a big infrastructure bill. Do you happen to know if we are finally getting that system upgraded?Listen, I will be the only person who probably ever interviews you who's actually had to fix a water main as a summer job. I spent [it at] my local Public Works Department where we'd have to fix water mains, and this was a number of years ago, and even a number of years ago, those pipes were really, really old. It didn't take much for them to get a main break.I'm one of those weird people who is bothered by this. All I can tell you is we have a lot of aging infrastructure. The last estimate that I've seen came before this sort of sudden jerky rise of construction costs, which, if you're at all involved in building, is basically all the people in the construction industry talk about. At that point, the estimate was that it was $1.2 trillion to fix the infrastructure that we have in the United States. I am sure it is higher now. I am delighted that the Biden people passed this infrastructure — would've been great if they passed permitting reform and a couple of other things to make it easier to spend the money, but okay. I would like to believe that the Trump people would take up the baton and go on this.Feeding the masses (18:20)I do worry that the kind of regulations, and rules, and ideas that we put into place to try and make agriculture more like this picture that we have in our head will end up inadvertently causing suffering for the people who are struggling.We're still going to have another two billion people, maybe, on this earth. Are we going to be able to feed them all?Yeah, I think that there's no question. The question is what we're going to be able to feed them? Are we going to be able to feed them all, filet mignon and truffled . . . whatever they put truffle oil on, and all that? Not so sure about that.All organic vegetables.At the moment, that seems really implausible, and there's a sort of fundamental argument going on here. There's a lot of people, again, both right and left, who are sort of freaked out by the scale that modern agriculture operates on. You fly over the middle-west and you see all those circles of center-pivot irrigation, they plowed under, in the beginning of the 20th century, 100 million acres of prairie to produce all that. And it's done with enormous amounts of capital, and it was done also partly by moving people out so that you could have this enormous stuff. The result is it creates a system that . . . doesn't match many people's vision of the friendly family farmer that they grew up with. It's a giant industrial process and people are freaked out by the scale. They don't trust these entities, the Cargills and the ADMs, and all these huge companies that they see as not having their interests at heart.It's very understandable. I live in a small town, we have a farm down there, and Jeremy runs it, and I'm very happy to see Jeremy. There's no Jeremy at Archer Daniels Midland. So the result is that there's a big revulsion against that, and people want to downsize the scale, and they point to very real environmental problems that big agriculture has, and they say that that is reason for this. The great problem is that in every single study that I am aware of, the sort of small, local farms don't produce as much food per acre or per hectare as the big, soulless industrial processes. So if you're concerned about feeding everybody, that's something you have to really weigh in your head, or heavy in your heart.That sort of notion of what a farm should look like and what good food is, that kind of almost romantic notion really, to me, plays into the sort of anti-growth or the degrowth people who seemed to be saying that farms could only be this one thing — probably they don't even remember those farms anymore — that I saw in a storybook. It's like a family farm, everything's grown local, not a very industrial process, but you're talking about a very different world. Maybe that's a world they want, but I don't know if that's a world you want if you're a poor person in this world.No, and like I said, I love going to the small farm next to us and talking to Jeremy and he says, “Oh look, we've just got these tomatoes,” it's great, but I have to pay for that privilege. And it is a privilege because Jeremy is barely making it and charging twice as much as the supermarket. There's no economies of scale for him. He still has to buy all the equipment, but he's putting it over 20 acres instead of 2000 acres. In addition, it's because it's this hyper-diverse farm — which is wonderful; they get to see the strawberries, and the tomatoes, and all the different things — it means he has to hire much more labor than it would be if he was just specializing in one thing. So his costs are inevitably much, much higher, and, therefore, I have to pay a lot more to keep him going. That's fine for me; I'm a middle-class person, I like food, this can be my hobby going there.I'd hate to have somebody tell me it's bad, but it's not a system that is geared for people who are struggling. There are just a ton of people all over the world who are struggling. They're better off than they were 100 years ago, but they're still struggling. I do worry that the kind of regulations, and rules, and ideas that we put into place to try and make agriculture more like this picture that we have in our head will end up inadvertently causing suffering for the people who are struggling.To make sure everybody can get fed in the future, do we need a lot more innovation?Innovation is always good. I would say that we do, and the kinds of innovation we need are not often what people imagine. For example, it's pretty clear that parts of the world are getting drier, and therefore irrigation is getting more difficult. The American Southwest is a primary candidate, and you go to the Safford Valley, which I did a few years ago — the Safford Valley is in southeast Arizona and it's hotter than hell there. I went there and it's 106 degrees and there's water from the Colorado River, 800 miles away, being channeled there, and they're growing Pima cotton. Pima cotton is this very good fine cotton that they use to make fancy clothes, and it's a great cash crop for farmers, but growing it involves channeling water from the Colorado 800 miles, and then they grow it by what's called flood irrigation, which is where you just fill the field with an inch of water. I was there actually to see an archeologist who's a water engineer, and I said to him, “Gee, it's hot! How much that water is evaporated?” And he said, “Oh, all of it.”So we need to think about that kind of thing if the Colorado is going to run out of water, which it is now. There's ways you can do it, you can possibly genetically modify cotton to use less water. You could drip irrigation, which is a much more efficient form of irrigation, it's readily available, but it's expensive. So you could try to help farmers do that. I think if you cut the soft costs, which is called the regulatory costs of farming, you might be able to pay for it in that way. That would be one type of innovation. Another type of thing you could do is to do a different kind of farming which is called civil pastoral systems, where you grow tree crops and then you grow cattle underneath, and that uses dramatically less water. It's being done in Sonora, just across the border and the tree crops — trees are basically wild. People don't breed them because it takes so long, but we now have the tools to breed them, and so you could make highly productive trees with cattle underneath and have a system that produces a lot of calories or a lot of good stuff. That's all the different kinds of innovation that we could do. Just some of the different kinds of innovation we could do and all would help.Indigenous America (25:20)Part of the reason I wrote these things is that I realized it's really interesting and I didn't learn anything about it in school.Great articles in The New Atlantis, big fan of “Wizard and the Prophet,” but I'm going to take one minute and ask you about your great books talking about the story of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. If I just want to travel in the United States and I'm interested in finding out more about Native Americans in the United States, where would you tell me to go?One of my favorite places just it's so amazing, is Chaco Canyon, and that's in the Four Corners area — that whole Four Corners area is quite incredible — and Chaco Canyon is a sign that native people could build amazing stuff, and native people could be crazy, in my opinion. It's in the middle of nowhere, it has no water, and for reasons that are probably spiritual and religious, they built an enormous number of essentially castles in this canyon, and they're incredible.The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito as it's called now, it's like 800 rooms. They're just enormous. And you can go there, and you can see these places, and you can just walk around, and it is incredible. You drive up a little bit to Mesa Verde and there's hundreds of these incredible cliff dwellings. What seems to have happened — I'm going to put this really informally and kind of jokingly to you, not the way that an archeologist would talk about it or I would write about it, but what looks like it happened is that the Chaco Canyon is this big canyon, and on the good side that gets the southern exposure is all these big houses. And then the minions and the hoi polloi lived on the other side, and it looks like, around 800, 900, they just got really tired of serving the kings and they had something like a democratic revolution, and they just left, most of them, and founded the Pueblos, which is these intensely democratic self-governing bodies that are kind of like what Thomas Jefferson thought the United States should be.Then it's like all the doctors, and the lawyers, and the MBAs, and the rich guys went up to Mesa Verde and they started off their own little kingdoms and they all fought with each other. So you have these crazy cliff dwellings where it's impossible to get in and there's hundreds of people living in these niches in these cliffs, and then that blew up too. So you could see history, democracy, and really great architecture all in one place.If someone asked me for my advice about changing the curriculum in school, one, people would leave school knowing who the heroes of progress and heroes of the Agricultural Revolution were. And I think they'd also know a lot more about pre-Columbian history of the Americas. I think they should know about it but I also think it's just super interesting, though of course you've brought it to life in a beautiful way.Thank you very much, and I couldn't agree with you more. Part of the reason I wrote these things is that I realized it's really interesting and I didn't learn anything about it in school.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedFaster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Components of nature connection and the basic skills that everyone's ancestors practiced. Host/co-producer Ally Richardson and guests Iraiah & Austin – who run Smokebrush's Earth Skill Club – talk about facilitating opportunities in our local community to foster deeper connections, not only with fellow humans but with all living things in our surrounding ecosystems. Deeply engage your senses, so together we can witness how living closely with our earth is practical, accessible, & tangible. Tune in to explore how these ancient practices can enrich our modern lives.Mentioned in this episode:Join Earth Skill Club for three hands-on classes— 2nd Saturday of the month all spring long! ⏰12:30 pm - 2:30 Fiber & Cordage - March 8th. Learn the basics of fiber processing through cordage making, an essential for making tools, shelter, and clothing from the earth. Learn how to make rope with the help of your friends, tie knots to create proper leverage, and create an ultralight backpack tie. Stone & Bone Tools - April 12th. Dive into the art of crafting tools from materials such bone and stone all stemming from the simplest of measures - a sharp edge. Play with nature as we create our own biodegradable, primitive cutting devices. Tap into curiosity as we listen to the density of rock's sounds, observing what they can tell us to discover their best uses. Friction Fire Building - May 10th. Ignite your instincts and get a work out as we tap into the age-old skill of fire building, a cornerstone of surviving and thriving. Practice creating a fire with sticks through the power of hand and bow drill friction kits, using different local woods to birth the coal that will provide nourishment to our bird nest kindling.Earth Skill Club on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/people/EarthSkills-of-Manitou/100086610595176/Earth Skill Club on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/earthskills_of_manitou/ Rocky Mountain Highway's Meadowgrass Music Festival May 23, 10am - May 25 · 11:30pm https://meadowgrass.org/Be sure to check out Smokebrush's Puppet Show!Listen to last year's Studio 809 podcast about Meadowgrass here: https://rockymountainhighway.org/meadowgrass-2024-featured-on-studio-809-podcast/ Pikes Peak Permaculture's The Seed Garden Class March 15, 9:00 am - 4:00 pm Go to https://pikespeakpermaculture.org or click here to register: https://form.jotform.com/250237033443043Join us for this class and discussion on the value of seeds. Learn about seed starting and saving techniques and participate in a seed swap. Learn the value of climate adaptation and landrace development in seed stock and how it helps to strengthen community food sheds. Build community and meet great people who face the same perils of gardening our region as you do. An Amazing List of Resources our guests recommend! Check them out at your local library.1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Book by Charles C. MannTending the Wild:...

Dr. Abdullah Hakim Quick delivers definitive evidence of Muslim and African explorers travelling to the Americas long before Columbus. Learn about the remarkable technologies and ambitions of some of the greatest explorers Western textbooks forgot to mention. This episode is part of a course presented with AlMaghrib Institute. 

For the last couple of years, I have been going to Pawpaw Fest which my friend and neighbour Matt Soltys organizes. Matt Soltys, for those listeners who don't know yet, is The Urban Orchardist. He teaches me about fruit and nut trees and I help him try and sort out which insects are leaving their sign on the trees. But back to the point… Pawpaws. Asimina triloba. A fruit with a comeback story. Have you tried one yet? I bet most folks listening have. They are growing more and more, both literally on the land and metaphorically in all the surrounding hype. Is it worth the hype? Matt Soltys seems to think so. He is growing hundreds of them (I had to fact check this statement, and yes, it is true). We sat down to discuss Pawpaws, a bit about their ecology and about the assisted migration that likely allowed the Pawpaw to arrive in Southern Ontario. I really don't know much about the species but want to get as much info as I can as they are likely going to be seen on the landscape more frequently as people get excited about this peculiar fruit. Why the big leaves? How did they get here? What happens at Pawpaw Fest? Where is it? How do I get there? (Sunday October 6th, Simpler Thyme Organic Farm, 1749 Hwy 6, between Guelph and Hamilton.) For more info listen to the show or check out The Urban Orchardist instagram page. Correction : Matt mentioned Malus floribunda as the name of the apple native to the southern Great Lakes area, but he afterwards he realized he made a mistake, and the species is Malus coronaria. To learn more : Shrubs of Ontario by James H. Soper and Margaret L. Heimburger, ROM Publications , 1982.The Dawn of Everything by by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021.1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Knopf, 2005.Growing Trees From Seed by Henry Kock. Firefly Books, 2008.The role of anthropogenic dispersal in shaping the distribution and genetic composition of a widespread North American tree species by Graham E. Wyatt, J. L. Hamrick, Dorset W. Trapnell. Ecology and Evolution, 2021. The Urban Orchardist websiteMatt's Instagram

"I really want to focus on the collective nature of being stolen, because it wasn't just me. It was the vast majority of Native adoptees." -- Pete Patton Episode Summary: In this episode of Unraveling Adoption, co-hosted by Beth Syverson and her son Joey, they interview Pete Patton,LCSW, an Indigenous Inuit adoptee who shares his experiences of being stolen and adopted. Pete discusses the historical context of racism in Oregon and the impact it had on Native American communities there and elsewhere. He also delves into his journey of reconnecting with his Indigenous heritage and the healing process he has undergone. Pete highlights the importance of understanding the collective experiences of adoptees and the need for reconnection with ancestors. The conversation sheds light on the complexities of adoption and the importance of listening to and learning from Indigenous voices. The episode emphasizes the significance of acknowledging and honoring the stories of adoptees and the importance of cultural reconnection for healing.   Photo Credit for cover photo of Pete: Alberto Moreno ===============

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On this week's news episode we start with two stories about slavery. The first comes from the discovery of a 2000 year old child's show found in an Austrian mine. The second is from Ghana and the discovery of Britain's first slave fort in Africa. Finally, we learn about conclusive evidence of Vikings arriving in the Americas well before Columbus.Links 2,000-Year-Old Child's Shoe Found in Austrian Minehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2000-year-old-childs-shoe-found-in-austria-180982946/ 2000-year-old child's leather shoe discovered in Austrian salt minehttps://archaeologymag.com/2023/09/childs-leather-shoe-discovered-in-austria/ Dig reveals the roots of Britain's slave trade — and the bloody birth of our worldhttps://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dig-reveals-the-roots-of-britains-slave-trade-and-the-bloody-birth-of-the-modern-world-ll5zzbmnn 'First English slave fort in Africa' uncovered on Ghana's coast https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66359512 A Stunning Discovery Proves That Vikings Reached the Americas Before Columbus https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a45823574/vikings-in-america-before-columbus-new-discovery/ RodsterAdventures Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/rodsteradventuresContact Chris Websterchris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Rachel Rodenrachel@unraveleddesigns.comRachelUnraveled (Instagram)ArchPodNet APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet Tee Public Store: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/archaeology-podcast-network?ref_id=5724Affiliates Motion: https://www.archpodnet.com/motion Motley FoolSave $110 off the full list price of Stock Advisor for your first year, go to https://zen.ai/apnfool and start your investing journey today!*$110 discount off of $199 per year list price. Membership will renew annually at the then current list price. Liquid I.V.Ready to shop better hydration, use my special link https://zen.ai/thearchaeologypodnetworkfeed to save 20% off anything you order.

On this week's news episode we start with two stories about slavery. The first comes from the discovery of a 2000 year old child's show found in an Austrian mine. The second is from Ghana and the discovery of Britain's first slave fort in Africa. Finally, we learn about conclusive evidence of Vikings arriving in the Americas well before Columbus.Links 2,000-Year-Old Child's Shoe Found in Austrian Minehttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2000-year-old-childs-shoe-found-in-austria-180982946/ 2000-year-old child's leather shoe discovered in Austrian salt minehttps://archaeologymag.com/2023/09/childs-leather-shoe-discovered-in-austria/ Dig reveals the roots of Britain's slave trade — and the bloody birth of our worldhttps://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dig-reveals-the-roots-of-britains-slave-trade-and-the-bloody-birth-of-the-modern-world-ll5zzbmnn 'First English slave fort in Africa' uncovered on Ghana's coast https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-66359512 A Stunning Discovery Proves That Vikings Reached the Americas Before Columbus https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a45823574/vikings-in-america-before-columbus-new-discovery/ RodsterAdventures Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/rodsteradventuresContact Chris Websterchris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Rachel Rodenrachel@unraveleddesigns.comRachelUnraveled (Instagram)ArchPodNet APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet Tee Public Store: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/archaeology-podcast-network?ref_id=5724Affiliates Motion: https://www.archpodnet.com/motion Motley FoolSave $110 off the full list price of Stock Advisor for your first year, go to https://zen.ai/archaeologyshowfool and start your investing journey today!*$110 discount off of $199 per year list price. Membership will renew annually at the then current list price. Liquid I.V.Ready to shop better hydration, use my special link https://zen.ai/thearchaeologyshow1 to save 20% off anything you order.

Hey there! Welcome to this awesome episode of the Unrefined Podcast, where we will be taking you on a wild ride through the world of genetic engineering, Mayan lore, and corn. Buckle up!So, in this episode, our fabulous hosts Brandon, Lindsy and BT are diving deep into the fascinating world of corn. And no, we're not just talking about your average corn on the cob here. We're talking about the genetically engineered corn that has some seriously cool ties to Mayan mythology. How cool is that?We kick things off by discussing this mind-blowing book called "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles Simon. This book takes us on a journey to explore the origins and unique characteristics of corn. Who knew corn had such a rich history, right?But wait, there's more! Lindsy and Brandon also delve into the mystical figure of Quetzalcoatl in Aztec and Mayan mythology. This dude is seriously symbolic and has been depicted in ancient Mesoamerican art. We're talking about some seriously cool visuals here, people!And of course, no mythological discussion is complete without touching on creation stories. Our hosts explore various creation stories in Aztec and Mayan mythology, giving us a glimpse into the historical changes in religious beliefs. It's like a rollercoaster of ancient awesomeness!But hey, we're not just here for the myths and legends. Lindsy and BT also touch on the potential health effects of corn in our diets. It's always good to know what we're putting into our bodies, right?To wrap things up, your hosts are kind enough to recommend additional resources for all you curious listeners out there who want to dive even deeper into Mayan and Aztec culture. We've got your back!So there you have it, folks. Get ready to have your mind blown by the incredible world of genetic engineering, Mayan mythology, and corn. It's gonna be a wild ride, so let's get started!https://unrefinedpodcast.com/(see bottom for links mentioned in show)Timestamps:The Book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" (00:02:01) The hosts discuss the book by Charles Simon, which challenges previous beliefs about the population and civilizations in the Americas before Columbus.Quetzalcoatl and Mesoamerican Mythology (00:09:21) The hosts explore the figure of Quetzalcoatl in Aztec and Mayan mythology, discussing its connection to the feathered serpent and its presence in ancient Mesoamerican art.The Feathered Serpent and Creation (00:12:17) Discussion on the symbolism of the handbag-like object in Mesoamerican art and its connection to creation.The Origins of the Feathered Serpent (00:12:52) Exploration of the earliest depictions of the feathered serpent in Olmec and Maya art and its association with conjuring and ancestor worship.Quetzalcoatl and the Maya (00:14:37) Explanation of the different names and influences on the figure of Quetzalcoatl in Aztec, Maya, and Toltec mythology, and the presence of the feathered serpent in Maya artwork.The creation of different suns (00:27:53) The hosts discuss the Aztec and Mayan belief in different eras with different suns, each representing a new attempt at creating something like human beings.Survivors of the flood turned into dogs (00:33:21) In the legends of the sun, two survivors of a flood are turned into dogs by the gods after they offend them by smoking up the heavens while cooking fish.Quetzalcoatl stealing the bones from the underworld (00:34:36) Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, is sent into the underworld to steal the bones of the previous people destroyed in the flood, possibly the bones of giants.The Origins of Corn (00:38:13) The hosts discuss the creation of the first humans from the blood of the feathered serpent and the bones of the ancient giants, and the introduction of corn as the sacred food.Symbolism of Corn in Mesoamerican Mythology (00:41:39) The hosts explore the interconnectedness between all life symbolized by the creation of man from maize, and the significance of corn as a staple in our diets.The Process of Preparing Corn (00:44:59) The hosts discuss the ancient process of using lime to wash corn in order to make it edible, and the secret knowledge behind the discovery of this method.The Feathered Serpent and Quetzalcoatl (00:47:49) The hosts discuss the figure of Quetzalcoatl in Aztec and Mayan mythology, and its connection to the feathered serpent.The Hero Twins and Defeating the Monster (00:50:23) The hosts explore the story of the hero twins defeating the monster, Seven Macaw, and the significance of this common theme in Native American mythology.Creation of Humans from Corn and Serpent Blood (00:57:27) The hosts discuss the various attempts to create humans, including the mixing of corn dough with the blood of a serpent deity, and the repudiation of the line of Noah.Quetzalcoatl and his origins (00:59:59) Discussion on the figure of Quetzalcoatl, his miraculous birth, and his role as a Toltec priest king.The dark mirror image of Quetzalcoatl (01:03:45) Exploration of the contrasting figure of Tezcatlipoca, also known as Tescatlipoca, who works against Quetzalcoatl and takes part in the creation.Quetzalcoatl and the morning star (01:05:06) Connection between Quetzalcoatl and the morning star, as well as the interpretation of ancient Mesoamerican art depicting Quetzalcoatl leaving on a raft of snakes.The Dresden Codex (01:13:01) The hosts mention the Dresden Codex, a codex that listeners can find out more about in relation to Mayan mythology.History and Mythology of the Aztecs (01:13:31) The book "History and Mythology of the Aztecs" by John Beer Horst is mentioned as a source for the legends of the sun.Cultural Appreciation (01:14:14) The hosts discuss the importance of cultural appreciation and learning about other cultures, celebrating uniqueness.History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopocahttps://a.co/d/dVWYesZhttps://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PopolVuh.pdf1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbushttps://a.co/d/5TH6hhvThe Gospel of the Toltecs: The Life and Teachings of Quetzalcoatlhttps://a.co/d/7oywa0aThe Discovery of Cornhttps://bit.ly/3R2L310The Empires of Atlantis: The Origins of Ancient Civilizationshttps://a.co/d/74Qc7SUThe Myth of Quetzalcoatlhttps://a.co/d/6ekcbpsMaize for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Cornhttps://a.co/d/6P0QUzCThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4656375/advertisement

This is a particularly exciting episode as we're joined by Charles C. Mann, the New York Times bestselling author of “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” and “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.” Charles shares insights with us about his more recent book, “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World,” and chats with Shely about the lessons the story of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt have for the future of agriculture. 

An exploration of the history, mythology, and evidence of those who traveled to pre-Columbian America.Native groups have lived in the Americas for more than 10,000 years, but the voyages of Columbus surely did not bring the first visitors. Uncharted covers a range of cultures who seemingly visited the Americas long before Columbus, including Egyptians, Greeks, Celts, Vikings, as well as various people from Asia; and one large Chinese group who likely settled in the Americas in 100 BC. Wallace-Murphy and Martin delve into a wealth of evidence and stories, from potential Roman and Phoenician shipwrecks off the coast of South America to Celtic and Norse exploration of North America.How did the Knights Templar influence the discovery of the New World? How did the Vikings navigate their way? What do the Sinclair family, the Rosslyn Chapel, and two Venetian brothers have to do with the discovery of a new continent? With source materials dating back through millennia, including very recent finds, this book will present a side of history still so readily dismissed by some.Columbus should be remembered, but remembered for the conquering tyrant he was. These other groups did not come to conquer, but to trade, explore, and escape.Tim Wallace-Murphy (1930–2019) studied medicine at University College, Dublin, and then qualified as a psychologist; he later became an author, lecturer, and historian. He has written more than a dozen books, including The Mark of the Beast (with Trevor Ravenscroft), Rex Deus, and Rosslyn: Guardian of the Secrets of the Holy Grail. This last book provided invaluable source material to Dan Brown for his bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.James Martin is a British historian, economist, and lecturer. James has previously worked in finance and employment law, and is presently a lecturer in further and higher education. He has dedicated a large portion of his more recent life to research into the Knights Templar, the Roman Empire, and the Western traditions of spirituality.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/2790919/advertisement

James Martin is a British Trade Unionist, Historian, Economist and Lecturer having previously worked in finance, employment law and now is a lecturer in further and higher education. As an historian, James believes that ‘understanding the past is crucial to understanding our future', noting that evidence should guide us but our minds should be open to ideas. James has studied a wide range of fields including Industrial Relations, Equalities, History & Politics, OSH, Astronomy and has recently completed a D.Ed to further his role as a Lecturer. James has taught for a number of academic instutions ranging from Ruskin, Oxford to Northern College. James has been a member and investigator of the Worsley Paranormal Group since its founding in 2003. He has made numerous appearances on Radio and Television and is now a regular on Nightvision Radio. He has described himself as a ‘history geek' and a ‘space nerd' and has dedicated a large portion of his more recent life in to research in to the Knights Templar, The Roman Empire and the Western Traditions of Spirituality. The motto that guides his research is G.O.Y.A – Get Off Your Ass, which is why you are more likely to find him out in the field.Website newrennies.orgBook Uncharted: A Rediscovered History of Voyages to the Americas Before Columbus

Joining me is James Martin, co-author of UNCHARTED: A Rediscovered History of Voyages to the Americas Before Columbus. He is a British historian, economist, and lecturer with experience in the field of paranormal investigation. James has been a member of and investigator for the Worsley Paranormal Group since its founding in 2003.Uncharted covers a range of cultures who seemingly have been visiting the Americas since long before Columbus. In compelling detail, the book presents stories of visiting distant lands that abound from many cultures, such as the Egyptian, Greeks, Celts, and one large Chinese group that likely settled in the Americas in 100 BC. Simply put, the history of the discovery of North America is all wrong. http://www.newrennies.orgPhiladelphia UFO Exposure Con: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/philadelphia-ufo-exposure-con-tickets-548109198367PLEASE HELP THE CHANNEL GROW • SUBSCRIBE, like, comment, and click the Notification Bell so you don't miss a show. Thank you! https://www.youtube.com/mysticloungePlease leave a review on iTunes or wherevery you listen to podcasts.LINK TREE: https://linktr.ee/CoffeeandUFOsHALF LIGHT documentary: https://tubitv.com/movies/678744/half-lightCheck out other fantastic Un-X shows at https://www.unxnetwork.com/shows

James Martin | Uncharted: A Rediscovered History of Voyages to the Americas Before Columbus

This is a documentary-podcast that covers the complete history of Peru. Every society in Peru's history has collapsed. From the Norte Chico, Chavín, Nazca, Inca Empire, to the Spanish Control, all have risen to the top, and ultimately met their demise. But why?... Come along for this captivating exploration of the rich tapestry that weaves the story of Peru, an extraordinary land steeped in ancient mysteries, grand civilizations, and vibrant cultural heritage. In this immersive 'Paper Mountains' Documentary-Podcast Episode, we embark on a remarkable journey through time, delving deep into the roots of Peru's captivating history. From the enigmatic ruins of the Incas, to the awe-inspiring architectural wonders of Machu Picchu. From the fascinating legacies of Pre-Columbian societies, to the dynamic pulse of modern-day Peru. We leave no stone unturned. Join us as we uncover the secrets of lost civilizations, trace the footsteps of conquerors and visionaries, and unravel the intricate web of traditions that continue to shape Peruvian culture today. Whether you're an avid history enthusiast or simply curious to learn about the vibrant heritage of this extraordinary nation, this podcast is your gateway to the grand narratives and hidden treasures of Peru's past. Subscribe now to embark on a captivating odyssey through time and witness the enduring legacy of Peru's fascinating history. Chapters: 0:00:00 - Introduction to the Entire History of Peru 0:02:54 - Political Protests & What's Going on Today 0:09:31 - 12,000 Years Ago & Ancient Peru 0:11:50 - Cradle of Civilization: The Norte Chico 0:18:07 - Pre-Columbian Peru & Chavín Culture 0:26:14 - Chankillo Complex & Casma–Sechin Basin 0:27:57 - Nazca Culture, Geoglyphs, & Trophy Heads 0:31:09 - Moche, Huaca del Sol, Sexuality, & Sacrifice 0:35:25 - Huari (Wari) Culture & Their Expansionism 0:38:37 - The Rise of the Inca Empire 0:44:32 - Túpac Inca's Conquest & Late 15th Century 0:47:22 - Quipu & Religion of the Inca 0:51:03 - Ayahuasca, Shamanism, & Healthcare 0:53:02 - More on Inca Beliefs & Machu Picchu 0:59:16 - Inca Technology: Bridges & Brain Surgeries 1:01:36 - Epidemics & The War of the Two Brothers 1:06:24 - Spanish Conquistadors Capture Atahualpa 1:09:26 - Collapse of the Inca & Francisco Pizarro 1:11:37 - Spanish Colonialization & Viceroy of Peru 1:16:00 - Slave Trade & Spanish Reorganization 1:19:20 - Independence Movements of Peru 1:23:35 - Republic of Peru, More Wars, & Corruption 1:25:24 - Modern Peru's Culture & Conclusion Welcome back to Paper Mountains Podcast! We have something very different with this episode, and I am very excited to share this with you today! I was first sparked with this idea when I was reading articles on the current protests in Peru, but western media seemed to be missing a lot of the story. I was pretty bummed out because we traveled this country for 5 weeks last year, and it was a beautiful experience. The people, the landscape, just everything. This country has so much history and culture to share with the world, and I wanted to help share some insight to their history and try to understand the current state of the country. I hope you enjoy this episode, learn some history, and broaden your perspective on the world. I know I enjoyed making this, so please let me know if you enjoyed this episode and style! All chapters are detailed above in the description, if you are interested in a specific topic. All References can be reviewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LeOx4MUVLdCehS910a1GyyrofmFf5NYDI7b8i3v1_xE/edit?usp=share_link Watch Our 'Traveling Peru' Video Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnXVaSlMvNqBsksCgk-9aeV5QZ9_aF6l8 Read our Traveling Wellburys Peru Blog Series: https://travelingwellburys.com/tag/peru/ 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann: https://a.co/d/5JQDy1Z Thanks for watching! Cheers! - Jake

"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" has been a New York Times best-selling book since publication in 2006. Charles C Mann's writings have reformed popular ideas about Native Americans and challenged cherished notions of nature. Join Charles and Tip in part 2 of a two-episode discussion about the origins of the book and some of the revelations about the peoples in North, Central, and South Americas over the last 2000 years. Look up 1491 wherever you buy books and get yourself a copy to read. Find the transcript and links to books mentioned in this show at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-96-charles-c-mann-americas-columbus-part-2

"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" has been a New York Times best-selling book since publication in 2006. Charles C Mann's writings have reformed popular ideas about Native Americans and challenged cherished notions of nature. Join Charles and Tip in part 1 of a two-episode discussion about the origins of the book and some of the revelations about the peoples in North, Central, and South Americas over the last 2000 years. Look up 1491 wherever you buy books and get yourself a copy to read. See books and articles mentioned in this episode at https://artofrange.com/episodes/aor-95-charles-c-mann-americas-columbus-part-1. Transcript coming soon at artofrange.com

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel   Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel   My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann   Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel   When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann   Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel   It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann   And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel   I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann   It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel   Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann   Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann   Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called ​​Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.”  If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann   I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann   Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann   This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.”  I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann   And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel   Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids––  who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann    It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel   Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann   Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann   So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel   Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann   Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel  No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel   I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann   I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep‌ trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern‌ Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel   Right.Charles C. Mann   I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel   I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann   I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?”  Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work”  so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann   Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel   Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann   Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel   Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann   You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann   No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel   Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann   That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel   It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann   Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel   Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann   That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann   Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann   I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann   To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann   This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel   So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann   It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true.  Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann   So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel   Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann   I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.

This week Dave (https://dgshow.org/hosts/dave) and Gunnar (https://dgshow.org/hosts/gunnar) talk about technology-enhanced sleep, technology-enhanced image generation, and technology-enhanced job hunting Gunnar endorses: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491%3A_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus) by Charles C. Mann Simply Piano (https://www.joytunes.com/simply-piano) Pianos.pub (https://pianos.pub/): Find a public piano to play Sur l'air de service (https://pianos.pub/piano/u077nj4) ← Burger King in France Red Hat Summit (https://www.redhat.com/en/summit)! Dave endorses: Grammarly Premium (https://www.grammarly.com/premium) Google Calendar appointment scheduling! (https://support.google.com/google-workspace-individual/answer/10729749) Compose with Markdown in Google Docs on web (https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/03/compose-with-markdown-in-google-docs-on.html) AI-Generated Sleep Podcast Urges You To Imagine Pleasant Nonsense (https://hackaday.com/2022/03/26/ai-generated-sleep-podcast-urges-you-to-imagine-pleasant-nonsense/) The Weirdest Product at MWC 2022 Is a Bedtime Knockout-Gas Dispenser (https://www.wired.com/story/mwc-2022-weirdest-product-bedtime-knockout-gas-dispenser/) DALL·E 2 (https://openai.com/dall-e-2/) How Job Applicants Try to Hack Résumé-Reading Software (https://www.wired.com/story/job-applicants-hack-resume-reading-software/) the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed (https://www.askamanager.org/2022/01/the-new-hire-who-showed-up-is-not-the-same-person-we-interviewed.html) Cutting Room Floor * Alvin and the Chipmunks at 16 RPM (https://docpop.org/2022/03/alvin-and-the-chipmunks-at-16-rpm/) We Give Thanks * The D&G Show Slack Clubhouse for the discussion topics!

Justin Beals is the Co-Founder and CEO of Strike Graph, which is a security compliance company. He's a serial entrepreneur with expertise in Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, and governance. Justin started Strike Graph to eliminate the confusion related to cybersecurity audits and certification processes. He enjoys making arcane cybersecurity standards plain and straightforward to achieve. In his role as CEO, Justin organizes strategic innovations at the crossroads of cybersecurity and compliance. He focuses on helping customers get significant value from Strike Graph. Justin has a BA in English and Theater from Fort Lewis College and lives in the Seattle area. “70% of data breaches are coming from third parties. So, it's important to ask deep questions about your vendors and their security.” – Justin Beals Today on the Tech Leader Talk podcast: - The importance of cybersecurity audits and certification processes - A first step for companies to strengthen their cybersecurity - How a BA in English and Theater is helpful in the tech world - Establishing a culture of employee growth - The value of Improv to your sales team Resources Book: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann - https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 Connect with Justin Beals: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jubeals/ Website: https://www.strikegraph.com/ Thanks for listening! Be sure to get your free copy of Steve's latest book, Cracking the Patent Code, and discover his proven system for identifying and protecting your most valuable inventions. Get the book at https://stevesponseller.com/book.

If you own, lease or have hunting rights on private land, this episode is for you. Hunter Pruitt is the founder of the National Wildlife Cooperative. A non-profit org created to connect private landowners with common goals of wildlife and land conservation. We discuss the NUMEROUS benefits of co-ops and the value it will bring you and your land. "Our mission at National Wildlife Cooperative is to document and aid growth of wildlife cooperatives across the United States - cooperatives focused on any form of wildlife or habitat management." EDIT: Hunter's suggested book read is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus www.nationalwildlifecoop.com Instagram @nationalwildlifecooperative | @hunter__pruitt Please leave a 5 star rating & a review!

Officially, this episode is on the amazing glowing algae living in the waters of three of Puerto Rico's bays, most notably Puerto Mosquito on Vieques, one of Puerto Rico's smaller islands. Listener and boriqueño native Roberto Cancel describes swimming in the bay on a dark night, surrounded by glowing blue waters. But most of the episode is devoted to perhaps the most important event in world history: 1493. Not 1492, but 1493. That's the year when Christopher Columbus returned to the Americas, not as an explorer, but as a conqueror. We discuss (and really only scratch the surface of) the impact of this second voyage. It's only the beginning, because every episode to come will exist in the new world (pun intended) created by this event. And we have shrimp mofongo, a boriqueño specialty that blends European, African, and American in a way that exemplifies the new global world. Sources: Bergreen, Laurence. Columbus: the Four Voyages Diamond, Jared. Germs, Guns, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Fodor's Puerto Rico Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History Textbook Got Wrong Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus  Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Photograph by Edgar Torres CC 3.0

Chico begins organizing against deforestation and starts a war with the local ranching community. The hosts see first hand what the burning looks like on the ground and learn more about the “good guys” and “bad guys” in the complex conflict between rubber tappers and ranchers, as well as the individuals and groups opposed to Chico before his murder. Finally, Chico is put into a leadership role in 1980.Sources:Hecht, Susanna, and Alexander Cockburn. The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon. University of Chicago Press, 2010.Revkin, Andrew. The Burning Season: the Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest. Island Press, 2004.Rodrigues, Gomercindo, et al. Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes: Struggle for Justice in the Amazon. University of Texas Press, 2007.Mendes, Chico, et al. Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in his Own Words. Latin America Bureau (Research and Action) Ltd, 1989.Mann, Charles C. 1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. 2nd ed., Random House LLC, 2005.Shoumatoff, Alex. “Murder in the Rainforest.” Vanity Fair, 1989.Mendes, Francisco. “Antihero.” Spin, September 1989, page 76-78.Brown, Foster. “Morte Entre Muitas.” Jornal A Gazeta, February 2020.

In the second episode, hosts Graham and Jim explore the origin story of Chico Mendes. They explore the past of the rubber trade in the Amazon, the rubber tappers' relationship with the forest, and their plight. More about the show:In the second season of Wildfire, we're shifting our perspective from fires in the forests of the American west to those taking place in the Amazon rainforest alongside a story of violence and heroism.On December 22nd 1988 in the town of Xapuri, Brazil a man named Chico Mendes was shot and killed at his home. He was killed for trying to protect the rainforest from the fires that were burning at an increasing rate; fires that were turning one of the most complex ecosystems in the world into cow pastures. In this season of Wildfire, hosts Jim Aikman and Graham Zimmerman look into the story of Chico Mendes—who he was, what he was fighting for, and how his legacy lives on. It's a story filled with intrigue and violence but also hope, both for the Amazon and for humankind. This 6-part series is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Episode sources:Hecht, Susanna, and Alexander Cockburn. The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon. University of Chicago Press, 2010.Revkin, Andrew. The Burning Season: the Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest. Island Press, 2004.Rodrigues, Gomercindo, et al. Walking the Forest with Chico Mendes: Struggle for Justice in the Amazon. University of Texas Press, 2007.Mendes, Chico, et al. Fight for the Forest: Chico Mendes in his Own Words. Latin America Bureau (Research and Action) Ltd, 1989.Mann, Charles C. 1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. 2nd ed., Random House LLC, 2005.Shoumatoff, Alex. “Murder in the Rainforest.” Vanity Fair, 1989.“Making a Difference : Chico Mendes . . .” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 22 Jan. 1989, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-22-op-1186-story.html.Mendes, Francisco. “Antihero.” Spin, September 1989, page 76-78.

In this video I discuss the definition and connotation of what it means to be indigenous. Sources: Bennett, Herman L. 2010. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Katzew, Ilona. 2005. Casta Painting: Images of Race In Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books. Seijas, Tatiana. 2014. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

On this week's episode, Macey is forcing us to put on our hiking shoes and dragging us out into the forest to look at some "really nice moss." The tentpoles we're discussing are Princess Mononoke, Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, and Ursula K. Le Guin's story ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow.' What We're Into Lately  ‘a kind of dwell and welcome' by leupagus Reputation by Lex Croucher Seven Days in June by Tia Williams orange_crushed ‘s Untamed fics (esp Pentimento.) And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler Victoria Goddard's books: Greenwing & Dart series (esp Love-in-a-Mist) Ask A Mortician Youtube Channel  Other Stuff We Mentioned Ted Lasso Gundam Wing Ponyo Robin Hood legends Hannibal The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones The Jungle Book by Ruyard Kipling The Secret Life of the Forest by Richard M. Ketchum The Hidden Life of Trees by by Peter Wohlleben Pando QI Semiosis by Sue Burke Brain coral Green Man motif For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten Hild by Nicola Griffith The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik Into the Woods Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon Black Sails Vikings Magician by Raymond E. Feist The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins Westworld Stargate: Atlantis Star Wars: Return of the Jedi Black Spot TV show Avatar Avatar: The Last Airbender Pocahontas Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer BTS Episode 16: A Bump In the Night, and Not the Sexy Kind Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Merlin Sheldrake's YouTube video showing him eating book fungus Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben Around the World In 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori ‘Colors of the Wind' from Pochahontas The Biggest Estate On Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia by Bill Gammage Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden For Next Time The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri Content Warnings Racism (in ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow') Problematic portrayal of an autistic character (in ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow')   Transcription The transcript for this episode is available here! Thanks to our team of scribes for their great work!

Host Neha Sampat, CEO of Contentstack, and Cindy Padnos, founder and Managing Partner of Illuminate Ventures, get together over a glass of wine and discuss the realities of capital raising and how to increase access to funds for underrepresented populations. Illuminate Ventures is a seed and early stage venture capital firm that invests exclusively in enterprise/B2B software companies. Cindy has been working with enterprise tech startups for more than 25 years - as a founder/CEO of a VC-backed company, a startup operating executive, and more recently as an investor. She is also the author of 3 research-based, widely-cited white papers addressing gender diversity in the tech sector. Neha and Cindy discuss:How venture capital worksWhat investors look for in a startupHow to make your startup stand out from the restThe importance of a strong networkWhy startups failThe Dreammakers enjoyed a glass of wine while they talked: Jean-Paul Droin Chablis Vaillons Premier Cru 2018. It's a Chablis from northern Burgundy, France. It's floral and mineral with flavors of citrus, green apple, green olive and toast. It's medium-bodied with sharp acidity. Other show notes:You Are My Sunshine is Cindy's wake up song1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is Cindy's book recommendation for her 19-year-old-selfVin Perdu is Cindy's wine recommendationFollow Host Neha Sampat on LinkedIn and @nehasfFollow Guest Cindy Padnos on LinkedIn and @IlluminateVCFollow @Contentstack

Why do we read the books we do? And when we read a book more than once, why is that? Having just finished Colin Woodward's 'The Republic of Pirates' for the second time in less than a year, and now closing in on a third read-through of Charles C. Mann's '1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,' I am trying to figure out what the common denominator is for me. Then I consider this piece at CNBC from January 2019 stating '24 percent of American adults haven't read a book in the past year' - and I am baffled that anyone can help reading at least one book in the course of a year, much less stopping at one. If you read some books regularly or routinely, why do you go back to the books you go back to? But if you do not read books at all, then you should. Fix that. Amend that. Add regular reading of good books to your routine. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, after all. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/garrett-ashley-mullet/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/garrett-ashley-mullet/support

Tongues totally in cheek, the Sistas break down the history of the Garifuna people: how were the Garifuna formed? What else was going on in the world while they were fighting against colonization in the 17th and 18th centuries? How did they end up in Central America? And WHAT does this have to do with spirituality? The Sistas tackle all these questions and more. Books and Articles to Get You Started on Your Own Research: Garifuna Nation Across Borders, Joseph Palacio Sojourners of the Caribbean, Nancie Gonzalez The Race Lept at Sauteurs: Genocide, Narrative and Indigenous Exile from the Caribbean Archipelago, Melanie J. Newton Rise and Fall of the Black Caribs, I. A. Earl Kirby and C. I. Martin The Black Carib Wars, Christopher Taylor The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James Among the Garifuna: Family Tales and Ethnography from the Caribbean Coast, Marylin McKillop Wells 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann Contact us: -email: garifunasistas@gmail.com -Instagram: https://instagram.com/garifunasistaspodcast?igshid=n918dprl2q8m-Facebook-Twitter More about Feroza Cayetano: - https://www.instagram.com/feroza.cayetano/ - https://ferozacayetano.bandcamp.com More about Kyleigh Simone: - https://instagram.com/kycaye?igshid=1jf1ikcrf9z73 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/garifunasistaspodcast/message

Weekly JourneywithJesus.net postings. Essay by Debie Thomas: *Who Are We Looking For?* for Sunday, 21 March 2021; book review by Dan Clendenin: *1491: New Revelations About the Americas Before Columbus* by Charles C. Mann (2005); film review by Dan Clendenin: *2020 Templeton Prize Virtual Ceremony for Francis Collins* (2019); poem selected by Dan Clendenin: *Mercy* by John F. Deane.

In this episode, Tim discusses:-his background-the importance, to a specific profession, of being a generalist -how he became interested in history-Native American history-the Apache and early Europeans-Native Americans of South Texas and Cypress Creek: the Karankawa, Akokisa, and othersBio: "Tim Seiter is a Ph.D. student in the Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University. He is writing a history of the Karankawa Indians of Texas and is also working on a social history of Texas’s eighteenth-century presidial soldiers. In July 2021, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly is publishing his latest article, 'The Karankawa-Spanish War from 1778 to 1789: Attempted Genocide and Karankawa Power.' "Tim's Website Karankawas: https://karankawas.comContact Michael:1. ccerppodcast@aol.com2. http://www.goldams.com 3. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-gold-2883921/ 4. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1152144714995033/Join us at CCERP on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/groups/1152144714995033/Show notesA. Books mentioned by Tim1. Elizabeth A.H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worldshttps://www.amazon.com/Storms-Brewed-Other-Mens-Worlds/dp/08061286902. Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Womanhttps://www.amazon.com/Peace-Came-Form-Woman-Borderlands/dp/08078579043. Kathleen DuVal, The Native Groundhttps://www.amazon.com/Native-Ground-Colonists-Continent-American-ebook/dp/B00C3K6J824. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empirehttps://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History/dp/03001511795. Matthew Babcock, Apache Adaptation to Hispanic Rulehttps://www.amazon.com/Adaptation-Hispanic-Studies-American-History/dp/11071213886. William C. Foster, Historic Native Peoples of Texashttps://www.amazon.com/Historic-Native-Peoples-William-Foster/dp/02927179387. Robert Ricklis, The Karankawa Indians of Texashttps://www.amazon.com/Karankawa-Indians-Texas-ARCHAEOLOGY-ETHNOHISTORY/dp/02927707748. Francisco Flores, Marcos de Zespeda, José de la Santa, et al., “Cabildo's petition to Governor to notify the Commandant General of deplorable conditions at Béxar,” 1781, BA.https://www.cah.utexas.edu/projects/bexar/gallery_doc.php?doc=e_bx_0035509. Dan Flores, Coyote Americahttps://www.amazon.com/Coyote-America-Natural-Supernatural-History/dp/0465093728/B. Education, Being a "Specialized Generalist," and Living1. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epsteinhttps://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/07352144842. Autism is an epigenetic condition. For detailed, scientific discussion refer to the book The Autism Revolution: Whole-Body Strategies for Making Life All It Can Be, by journalist Karen Weintraub and Harvard Medical School researcher and clinician Dr. Martha Herberhttps://www.amazon.com/Autism-Revolution-Whole-Body-Strategies-Making/dp/0345527208/3. A discussion with educator and philosopher Andrew Bernstein about modern education: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/184962814. A discussion with educators Gail Paquette and Kira Withrow, mother and daughter, on education: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/421734755. A discussion with Montessori Expert Charlotte Cushman on what Montessori education is and why we need it: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/186348826. Award-wining teacher Scott Harris on education.a. Part 1: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17685896b. Part 2: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17758518c. Another discussion with Scott: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/175564047. More here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-reasonrx-podcast8. Karl Friedrich Gaussa. https://www.storyofmathematics.com/19th_gauss.htmlb. http://www.bookrags.com/biography/karl-friedrich-gauss/c. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Gauss/d. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss9. Richard Feynmana. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynmanb. http://www.richardfeynman.comc. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-FeynmanC. Related information and books about S. Texas history1. Elusive Dreams: Early Exploration and Colonization of the Upper Texas Coast by James V Woodrick: Austin County: Colonial Capital of Texas by James V. Woodrick2. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/3. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247/4. American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains by Dan Floreshttps://www.amazon.com/American-Serengeti-Dan-Flores-audiobook/dp/B0716FGZ81/5. Texas Archeology: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ita/6. Cabeza de Vacaa. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/cabeza-de-vaca-lvar-nunezb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Álvar_Núñez_Cabeza_de_Vacac. "In Search of Cabeza de Vaca’s Route across Texas: An Historiographical Survey"by Donald E. Chipman: https://exhibits.library.txstate.edu/cabeza/pdfs/the_route/route_survey.pdfd. "Pinon Pines and the Route of Cabeza de Vaca" by Donald W. Olson, Marilynn S. Olson, Russell L. Doescher, et. al.: https://exhibits.library.txstate.edu/cabeza/pdfs/the_route/pinon_pines_route.pdfe. https://exhibits.library.txstate.edu/cabeza/exhibits/show/cabeza-de-vaca/further-study/the-route7. The Atakapaa. https://www.atakapa-ishak.orgb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atakapac. http://www.carsonphotos.com/skylineoa/files/index.html8. The Akokisaa. http://sites.utexas.edu/tarl/2015/02/10/the-akokisa-and-the-atakapans/b. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akokisac. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/akokisa-indiansd. https://www.hcp4.net/parks/jjp/akokisa/9. The Bidaia. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bidai-indiansb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidai10. I think it was the Groce Family who took the last of the wild horses on the Katy Prairiea. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bernardo-plantationb. https://texashistoricalmarkers.weebly.com/groce-family-plantations.htmlc. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=74265d. https://diverseeducation.com/article/12954/e. https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/artifacts/groce-family-portraitsf. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/groce-jared-ellisong. https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/ricewrc/00137/rice-00137.html11. Deep Roots, Strong Branches: A History of the Klein Family and the Klein Community, 1840-1940 by Diana Severance: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Roots-Strong-Branches-Community/dp/0965499995Image and bio courtesy of Tim Seifert

Russell Wallace is a traditional Líl'wat singer, composer, and producer from Mount Currie. He has been singing and making music his whole life. He talks with host Am Johal about his musical roots — singing traditional songs for his community and beyond, alongside his mother and siblings, as the performance group Tzo’Kam. They discuss Tzo’Kam’s longstanding collaborative relationship with the Japanese drumming group, Sawagi Taiko, as well as Russell’s own endeavours as a composer and producer for film, television, and theatre. He has contributed to productions such as, 1491: The Untold History of the Americas Before Columbus, The Road Forward, Monkey Beach, and more. Russell also speaks to the public singing and drumming workshops he instructs at SFU, which have been put on hold during the pandemic. Resources: — Unceded Tongues album by Russell Wallace: https://russellwallace.bandcamp.com/album/unceded-tongues — “Grandmother Song” by Tzo’Kam: https://youtu.be/ZH8VK-EBChk — Sawagi Taiko: http://sawagitaiko.com/ — Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival: http://www.heartofthecityfestival.com/ — Monkey Beach: https://monkeybeachmovie.com/ — The Road Forward: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rkCmDkYjwE — 1491: The Untold History of the Americas Before Columbus: https://www.aptn.ca/1491/

This episode is the first of at least five on Christopher Columbus, the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea." The episode discusses why Columbus should figure in to this history of the Americans in the first place, the state of Europe in 1491, why it was a European who connected the hemisphere rather than an Asian, Indian, African, or Muslim, and how it came that Columbus got the idea and built his "pitch deck" to raise the money for his venture. References for this episode Samuel Eliot Morison, The Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People Jill LePore, These Truths: A History of the United States Paul Johnson, A History of the American People Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

"Griff" Griffith joins us to discuss:-his background and how he became interested in nature-the flora, fauna, land, and First Peoples of Northern California-how First Peoples influenced their local ecologies-the importance of fire to some ecosystems-Kyle Burgess, "The Cougar Guy," and his Mountain Lion encounter that went viral-books Griff recommends-the importance of predators to keep ecosystems healthy for humans-habitat fragmentation-and moreAbout Griff: "As the host of Animal Planet’s online show 'Wild Jobs,' and a lifetime wildlife conservationist, John 'Griff' Griffith believes in the importance of relationships: wildlife to earth, wildlife to plants, wildlife to people, and people to people. This philosophy has led to many rewarding collaborations, including being selected by Earth Island Institute as one of four Americans to serve as low-impact ecotourism advisors to Siberia, being featured in the celebrated documentary 'Diversity and Inclusion in Our Wild Spaces,' and having his work introduced twice in the book, When Mountain Lions Are Neighbors. "His lifelong commitment to wildlife and people also includes a seventeen-year career as a supervisor in a youth development program called the California Conservation Corps, where he led groups of young adults, often from distressed communities, to restore natural areas and wildlife populations in a process he calls 'rewilding.' He often made videos with these Corps members, a few of which have gone viral. His most famous video 'Boss Dances Like a Boss' has 7 million views on YouTube alone and was featured on The Today Show, Headline News, Good Morning America, various international programs, and MTV’s Ain’t That America and Ridiculousness. Several of his other videos have been featured on the show RightThisMinute."In 2014, he also created the BioBlitz Dance for National Geographic and their BioBlitz events. The dance spread worldwide, with BioBlitz Dance videos coming from over 10 different countries. Two years after he created the dance, National Geographic flew John and two of his Corps members to Washington, D.C., to do the BioBlitz Dance onstage with Gary Knell, CEO of the National Geographic Society, and Sally Jewell, former Secretary of the Interior. The BioBlitz Dance is still being enjoyed at outdoor events all over the world, and became the official dance of several schools, kids’ camps, and P-22 Day Festivals, in Los Angeles. "When John is not writing, presenting, or making videos for his own online platforms, he’s helping people connect to the redwood region as a natural and cultural resource interpreter for California State Parks."Contact Griff:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GriffWildInstagram: @TheNatureNutYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TotemMagicGoingMADWild Jobs: https://www.facebook.com/watch/AnimalPlanet/341870596689084/Contact Michael:1. ccerppodcast@aol.com2. http://www.goldams.com 3. https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-gold-2883921/ 4. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1152144714995033/Join us at CCERP on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/groups/1152144714995033/Show notes1. Griff dance videosa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKNhCjA0pdUb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxDQHPvlD7A2. BioBlitz dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNpKrHgW9ow3. Animal Planet's Wild Jobs program: https://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/wild-jobs/4. Doug Tallamya. Bioi. https://www.udel.edu/faculty-staff/experts/douglas-tallamy/ii. https://www.udel.edu/canr/departments/entomology-and-wildlife-ecology/faculty-staff/doug-tallamy/iii. https://www.humansandnature.org/doug-tallamyb. Bringing Nature Home by Douglas W. Tallamyhttps://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Nature-Home-Wildlife-Expanded/dp/0881929921/c. Nature's Best Hope by Douglas W. Tallamyhttps://www.amazon.com/Natures-Best-Hope-Approach-Conservation/dp/1604699000/d. "Meet the Ecologist Who Wants You to Unleash the Wild on Your Backyard" by Jerry Adlerhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meet-ecologist-who-wants-unleash-wild-backyard-180974372/5. E.O. Wilsona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilsonb. https://eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson/c. Some of his booksi. Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life by Edward O. Wilsonhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZAT8VNE/ii. Tales From the Ant World by Edward O. Wilsonhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ZAT8VNE/iii. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilsonhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P5557DK/6. Eel River a. https://www.rivers.gov/rivers/eel.phpb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel_River_(California)7. Sinkyone Wilderness State Parka. http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=429b. https://www.stateparks.com/sinkyone_wilderness.htmlc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinkyone_Wilderness_State_Park8. Humboldt Redwoods State Parka. https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=425b. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Redwoods_State_Park9. Yuroka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurokb. https://www.yuroktribe.orgc. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yurok10. Wiyota. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiyotb. http://www.wiyot.us11. Hupaa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hupab. https://factcards.califa.org/cai/hupa.html12. Tribes of California: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/California_tribes_%26_languages_at_contact.png/1200px-California_tribes_%26_languages_at_contact.png13. The Ecological Benefits of Fire (a bit to get some idea about it and start looking into it)a. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/ecological-benefits-fire/b. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ecologyc. https://learnforests.org/sites/default/files/EcologicalRoleofFire.pdfd. https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/BF03400628e. http://pacificbio.org/initiatives/fire/fire_ecology.html14. Before the Wilderness: Environmental Management by Native Californians by Kat Anderson and Thomas C. Blackburn: https://www.amazon.com/Before-Wilderness-Environmental-Californians-Anthropological/dp/0879191260/15. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mannhttps://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059/16. Kyle Burgess and the Mountain Liona. Original videoi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Pg2CDCm34wii. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xu3FBGQ2Eoiii. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ktRhBcHza4b. Griff's interview of Kyle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grmIkU6Et4Ac. Griff talking about Mountain Lions and Kyle's incident: https://www.facebook.com/NorthCoastRedwoods/videos/347371733000314d. "Cougar Experts Weigh In On That Viral Video" by Sara Tabinhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/saratabin/2020/10/15/cougar-experts-weigh-in-on-that-viral-video/e. " ‘I don’t feel like dying today’: Utahn describes how he survived 6-minute cougar encounter" by Katie McKellar: https://www.deseret.com/utah/2020/10/12/21513450/utah-cougar-mountain-lion-encounter-viral-provo-slate-canyon-attack-stalk-survive17. Kyle Burgess's "I Am the Cougar Guy" website: https://www.iamthecougarguy.com18. Cougar Conservancy: https://cougarconservancy.org/19. Mountain Lion Foundation: https://mountainlion.org/20. Wolves of Yellowstonea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF4F7yvMlAMb. https://www.pbs.org/strangedays/episodes/predators/experts/yellowstonewolves.html?fbclid=IwAR0cuFEBV9alZ-0xg28Nv6yr5vALGl27q2EJTeOs8G3czK2JnoIH6v_wvtMc. "How Wolves Change Rivers:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q21. The importance of predators (a bit to get some idea about it and start looking into it)a. "The Crucial Role of Predators: A New Perspective on Ecology" by Caroline Fraserhttps://e360.yale.edu/features/the_crucial_role_of_predators_a_new_perspective_on_ecologyb. "The Ecological Importance of Predators" https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/predatorimportance.pdfc. "The Importance of Predators"https://www.predatordefense.org/predators.htmd. "Top Predators Key to Ecosystem Survival, Study Shows" by Bjorn Carey https://www.livescience.com/4171-top-predators-key-ecosystem-survival-study-shows.html22. Keystone speciesa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRGg5it5FMIb. "Robert Paine, UW ecologist who identified ‘keystone species,’ dies at 83:" https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/robert-paine-uw-ecologist-who-identified-keystone-species-dies-at-83/c. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_T._Paine_(zoologist)d. "The Ecologist Who Threw Starfish" by Sean Carroll: http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/the-ecologist-who-threw-starfish23. The Kaibab: a need for predators and good ecologya. "The Lesson of the Kaibab"https://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/kaibab.htmlb. "Was Aldo Leopold Right about the Kaibab Deer Herd?" by Binkley, Moore, et. al. http://www.rmtrr.org/data/Binkleyetal_2006_Ecosystems.pdf24. Habitat Fragmentation (a bit to get some idea about it and start looking into it)a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_fragmentationb. "Negative and positive effects of habitat fragmentation on animals"https://www.animal-ethics.org/negative-and-positive-effects-of-habitat-fragmentation-for-animals/c. "Causes and consequences of habitat fragmentation in river networks" by Fuller, Doyle, et. al. http://www.jlakes.org/config/hpkx/news_category/2016-03-22/Fuller_et_al-2015-Annals_of_the_New_York_Academy_of_Sciences.pdfd. "Ecological Responses to Habitat Fragmentation Per Se" by Lenore Fahrighttps://www.glel.carleton.ca/PDF/webDump/17FahrigAREES.pdfBio and picture courtesy John "Griff" Griffith.

This is part two and the final part of our conversation with Mylan Tootoosis. Since we defined a lot of concepts and terms in episode one, part two explores those ideas and their applications. We dive into racism and white supremacy, how colonization erases and rewrites Native culture, double consciousness as a way to understand code-switching and white gaze, land-based education (education outside of the classroom), oral tradition, pressures of being nonwhite, and living with the Zapatistas. When we think of the Left, we think of the Marxist to Anarchist binary. Some might generously even include liberals. However, with these two episodes, we'd like to illuminate how anti-imperialism/colonialism is a primary radical tradition with overlaps to the European radical traditions, rather than a subset. Capitalism is a problem, but the oppression of racism, imperialism, and colonialism are timeless. We can't continue to produce important episodes like this one without your solidarity. There is no Southpaw without your financial support. In return, not only do you help produce the show but you also get access to more great content. It's mutual aid. Find our Patreon and swag at: https://www.southpawpod.com Find Radicle Narrative at: https://radiclenarrative.com Find Mylan at: https://www.mylanmurdo.com Find Idle No More at: https://idlenomore.ca Books to Read The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon: https://amzn.to/2GL0sBA and free audio version: https://youtu.be/vDjRF17Ea3c Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon: https://amzn.to/36jZsgM 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann: https://amzn.to/2GTDUP8 The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois: https://amzn.to/3kWCt0f You can find Southpaw on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram: @SouthpawPod You can also find Sam on Twitter and Instagram: @StuffFromSam

Charles Mann – 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - The more we examine, and dig into American history, the earlier and more complex the story. realized nobody had written a history of the Americas before Columbus arrived.  Get Charles' wonderful book on Amazon Charles' book gets into a variety of aspects of early history--and the battles waged in academia as the timeline of human inhabitation of the Americas continues to travel further and further back into time. There are so many great nuggets from this book; you're going to be forced to enjoy this conversation.   -  Haiku Before Columbus  And before the Indians   There was history   Similar episodes:        ​Join us in supporting Save the Brave as we battle PTSD.  ​ ​ Executive Producer/Host: Pete A Turner    Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev  ​ ​ ​​ ​​ ​​The Break It Down Show is your favorite best, new podcast, featuring 5 episodes a week with great interviews highlighting world-class guests from a wide array of show

This week, the Friends weren't able to record an intro together. But their guest is pretty epic. They welcomed Tony-winning actor/writer John Leguizamo, who is now adding director to his resume. He's starring in and directing a new film, Critical Thinking, where he plays a chess teacher who helps inspires a group of low-income Black and Latinx high-schoolers to national chess championship victory. Leguizamo drops by to talk about the film, Latin History for Morons (currently on Netflix), and his ongoing work to advance Latinx representation in film and theater. Here are links to the things discussed in this episode. Critical Thinking Latin History for Morons Leguizamo recommends that you all read: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann That NPR interview where Leguizamo talked about being heckled by racist audience members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science Book Movement - Notion360. Revisión Online del Libro: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus de Charles C. Mann. Invitado: Patricia Llanos - GIS and remote sensing. Inscríbete aquí para recibir los enlaces, notificaciones y todo el material durante el evento. https://notion360.co/registro See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We spend a lot of time discussing the impacts of the climate crisis we need to avoid as a global community, including but not limited to sea-level rise, climate refugees, and the collapse of our agricultural system. But astrobiologist David Grinspoon argues that we need to go beyond simply mitigating the risks of climate change and consider what kind of future we want to create. And he sees the rise of planetary change agents conscious of their role as bigger than mere epoch status as typically conceived of with the Anthropocene. David posits that this change deserves its own eon, the Sapiezoic, or Time of Wisdom.   Dr. David Grinspoon is the author of Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. He is also part of the team working with NASA on a proposed mission to Venus! On this bonus episode of Reversing Climate Change, David is back on the show with Ross to discuss the basic units of the geological time scale and explain why he proposes calling this new time marked by human impact and self-awareness the Sapiezoic Eon rather than the Anthropocene Epoch.   Listen in for insight on what’s unique about the current transition in geological time and learn how we can create a vision for the future that includes a sustainable, lasting global civilization.   Key Takeaways   [3:31] David’s work on DAVINCI+ Part of team proposing NASA mission to Venus Selected as one of four finalists (two will fly) Other planets help us better understand Earth   [7:32] The basic units of the geologic time scale Only five eons, each spans billions of years Epochs = much smaller units (millions of years)   [11:23] The Anthropocene vs. the Sapiezoic  Anthropocene = proposed epoch to mark human forces changing Earth Eons represent new relationship between life + planet that causes irreversible change David proposes Sapiezoic Eon = time of wisdom (cognitive processes changing planet)   [18:51] The Sapiezoic Eon as an aspirational goal Opportunity to think about how we want to change planet Use technology to transition to lasting, sustainable state   [24:29] David’s concept of the Terra Sapiens Use growing knowledge to create vision of future we want (Wise Earth) Imagine role for ourselves on planet as sustainable, global civilization   Connect with Ross    Nori Nori on Patreon Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori Newsletter Email hello@nori.com Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future by David Grinspoon David on Twitter Funky Science Story Hour David on RCC EP047 The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann DAVINCI+ Peter Brannen on RCC Bonus #4

On today's Global Exchange Podcast, we are broadcasting an armchair discussion with Richard Fontaine on “Modernizing American Homeland Defence” from our 29 Jan. 2019 Modernizing North American Defence conference. The Global Exchange is part of the CGAI Podcast Network. This conference was made possible by the MINDS program from the Department of National Defence. Subscribe to the CGAI Podcast Network on SoundCloud, iTunes, or wherever else you can find Podcasts! Bios: - Colin Robertson (host) - A former Canadian diplomat, Colin Robertson is Vice President of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. - Richard Fontaine: Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He served as President of CNAS from 2012-19 and as Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow from 2009-12. Prior to CNAS, he Fontaine served as foreign policy advisor to the McCain 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently as the minority deputy staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee. RECOMMENDED READINGS: - “Rising to the China Challenge: Renewing American Competitiveness in the Indo-Pacific” by Ely Ratner, Daniel Kliman, Susanna V. Blume, Rush Doshi, Chris Dougherty, Richard Fontaine, Peter Harrell, Martijn Rasser, Elizabeth Rosenberg, Eric Sayers, Daleep Singh, Paul Scharre, Loren DeJonge Schulman, Neil Bhatiya, Ashley Feng, Joshua Fitt, Megan Lamberth, Kristine Lee and Ainikki Riikonen [CNAS Publication] (https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/rising-to-the-china-challenge) - “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann (https://www.amazon.ca/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus/dp/1400032059) - “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created” by Charles C. Mann (https://www.amazon.ca/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created/dp/0307278247/) - “The Cremation of Sam McGee” By Robert Service [Author], Ted Harrison [Illustrator] (https://www.amazon.ca/Cremation-Sam-McGee-Robert-Service/dp/1554532728) Related Links: - “Modernizing North American Defence” [Conference Program] (www.cgai.ca/modernization_of_no…th_american_defence) - “Centre for a New American Security” (https://www.cnas.org/) Recording Date: January 29, 2020 Give 'The Global Exchange' a review on iTunes! Follow the Canadian Global Affairs Institute on Facebook, Twitter (@CAGlobalAffairs), or on Linkedin. Head over to our website www.cgai.ca for more commentary. Produced by Jay Rankin. Music credits to Drew Phillips.

Trees are carbon storage machines. And they are disappearing at an alarming rate. In fact, experts predict that California could lose two-thirds of its 33M acres of forest in the next 15 to 20 years due to megafire and climate-driven disease and mortality. What’s more, the 2018 fires there emitted 68B tons of carbon, the equivalent of powering the state of California for an entire year. So, what can we do to restore our forests and manage them long-term in a way that mitigates the risk of megafire?   Allison Wolff is the Founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, a firm that leverages the power of narrative to mobilize positive social change. She has 25 years of experience in the space, and her impressive client roster includes Google, eBay, Facebook and Netflix. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Allison joins Ross and Christophe to discuss what sparked her interest in the megafire issue and explain why the California forests are burning—and what we can do about it.   Allison also weighs in on the thousands of jobs associated with restoring and maintaining our forests long-term and how we might employ a new carbon accounting system to fund the necessary work. Listen in for Allison’s take on why a ‘let them burn’ policy is misguided and learn how you can get involved in promoting a carbon market that would pay to bring resilience back AND mitigate fire risk in our forests.    Key Takeaways   [1:45] Allison’s path to Reversing Climate Change 25 years in brand experience at tech companies Establish sustainability, social impact initiatives Developed interest in movement building (Facebook Live at Paris climate talks) Work with Paul Hawken on Project Drawdown Study severity of megafire problem in California   [10:45] Why Allison is interested in working with Nori Need financing from carbon markets to restore forests Leverage Nori model for drawdown to motivate IFM   [12:57] Why California forests are burning Low-intensity fires recycled nutrients in heterogeneous forests for 20K years Europeans removed fire, clear cut most of West and planted mono-forests Teenage trees too close together + ground fuel carries fire to tree canopy Add high winds form desert to fuel megafire moving at speeds never seen 2018 fires in CA emitted 68B tons of carbon, impacts water system as well   [22:19] What we can do to reintroduce low-intensity fire Employ burn bosses to burn safe areas now Rally ‘sleeping allies’ to invest in process Clear out biomass with prescribed burns/by hand Cut little trees for biochar, cross-laminated timber   [28:12] Allison’s insight around the potential to restore forests Hopeful because we have model for resilience Concerns re: capital, scaling workforce quickly   [31:35] How we might pay for forest restoration Forest Resilience Bonds Surcharge for water provided by forests Carbon markets like Nori Public health funds for mental health   [36:18] The jobs associated with restoring forests Large unemployed population in rural West Thousands of jobs available but need funding   [38:09] Allison’s take on the Sierra Club no touch policy Understand idea behind let it burn policy (prevent big logging) Owe it to fellow species to bring back resilience in forests   [41:33] The potential to create a new accounting system for carbon Board feet = $10/ton, Biomass + slash waste = 10¢/ton Create market for carbon storage in trees and soil  Monetize embodied carbon in products, avoided cost of fire   [47:28] Allison’s work with the California Forest Observatory Dynamic, real-time system monitors forest health, wildfire risk AI engine combines available LiDAR + meteorological data Allows for fire mitigation and forest restoration planning   [52:58] How RCC listeners can get involved in Allison’s work Share story of forest restoration and idea of carbon market Need innovation and ideas as well as philanthropic capital   Connect with Ross & Christophe    Nori Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori Newsletter Email hello@nori.com Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   Vibrant Planet Salo Sciences VERGE 19 GreenBiz eBay Giving Works Meg Whitman Google Green Facebook Sustainability Social Good at Facebook Facebook Data for Good Bill Weihl The Paris Agreement Copenhagen Climate Change Conference Earth on Facebook Paul Hawken Project Drawdown Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming edited by Paul Hawken Malcolm North Scott Stephens The Sagehen Experimental Forest The Nature Conservancy Forest Resilience Bond Blue Forest Conservation Blue Forest Pilot with Yuba County Water Agency Stanford Natural Capital Project Mental Health as an Ecosystem Service 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Sierra Club The Yurok Tribe Karuk Tribe CAL FIRE Planet Data European Sentinel System California Forest Observatory National Center for Atmospheric Research 

Charles Mann is a science-focused journalist and award-winning author. He's the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year which he followed up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Charles has co-authored four books, is contributing editor for Science,... The post The Epic Battle Between Technologists and Naturalists Trying to Stop Climate Change | Charles Mann appeared first on The Syndicate.

Welcome to The Disruptors: Future Snippets: Bite-sized clips with TED level top thinkers, founders and scientists on how advances in biotech & genomics, space travel, IoT, AI and other exponential tech converge to create our collective future and what we can do, from a research and policy perspective to shape the trends, technologies and societal norms for a better world. We'll be publishing a few of these mini-episodes in the main feed before transitioning them over to their own separate feed, which you can subscribe to at https://disruptors.fm/poditunes Charles Mann (@CharlesCMann) is a science-focused journalist and award-winning author. He's the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year which he followed up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Charles has co-authored four books, is contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired and has also written for Fortune, NYTimes, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He is a three-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2018, Mann published The Wizard and the Prophet, which details two competing theories about the future of agriculture, population, and the environment. Subscribe to Disruptors Snippets: https://disruptors.fm/poditunes

Charles Mann (@CharlesCMann) is a science-focused journalist and award-winning author. He's the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year which he followed up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Charles has co-authored four books, is contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired and has also written for Fortune, NYTimes, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He is a three-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2018, Mann published The Wizard and the Prophet, which details two competing theories about the future of agriculture, population, and the environment.To listen to the entire episode, visit: https://disruptors.fm/120-the-epic-battle-between-technologists-and-naturalists-trying-to-stop-climate-change-charles-mann-2/Subscribe to Disruptors Snippets: https://disruptors.fm/poditunesSubscribe to The Disruptors main podcast: Support The Disruptors Mini-Series - AKA FringeFM or Fringe FM: Short Clips About the Future | Climate Change | Longevity | TED Talks | Crypto | Automation

Charles Mann (@CharlesCMann) is a science-focused journalist and award-winning author. He’s the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year which he followed up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Charles has co-authored four books, is contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired and has also written for Fortune, NYTimes, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He is a three-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2018, Mann published The Wizard and the Prophet, which details two competing theories about the future of agriculture, population, and the environment.To listen to the entire episode, visit: [https://disruptors.fm/120-the-epic-battle-between-technologists-and-naturalists-trying-to-stop-climate-change-charles-mann-2/](https://disruptors.fm/120-the-epic-battle-between-technologists-and-naturalists-trying-to-stop-climate-change-charles-mann-2/)Subscribe to Disruptors Snippets: [https://disruptors.fm/poditunes](https://disruptors.fm/poditunes)Subscribe to The Disruptors main podcast: [https://disruptors.fm/itunes](https://disruptors.fm/itunes)

Decolonising Anarchism: Indigenous Anarchist FederationIAF members Bombshell and insurgent e on the formation of the Indigenous Anarchist Federation, and their own personal and political histories as Indigenous anarchists situated within anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and anti-fascist frameworks. Also, the Indigenous Anarchist Convergence coming up August 16-18 in Flagstaff, Arizona.Audio excerpts have been sourced, with thanks, from The Final Straw Radio Links:Cutcha Risling Baldy Indigenous feminismOpen Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (en Espanol Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina)Indigenous Peoples History of the United States by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. MannOur History Is The Future by Nick Estes500 Years of Indigenous Resistance by Gord Hill Earth Matters #1202 was produced by Nicky Stott 

There Is No Liberation Until The Borders Are Gone: Bruno from CIMA and Members of IAF Speak This week we are super pleased to share an interview that William did a few weeks ago with two members of the Indigenous Anarchist Federation, Bombshell and insurgent e! We got to talk about a lot of topics in this episode, which was recorded on about the year anniversary of the formation of the Indigenous Anarchist Federation. Bombshell and insurgent e talked about their histories as anarchist people, about the formation of this Federation, what true decolonization of anarchism could look like, and about the upcoming Indigenous Anarchist Convergence which is happening from August 16th-18th in Kinlani, Navajo land, occupied Flagstaff AZ, plus many other topics! I really appreciated getting to connect with Bombshell and e, hearing their words on the topics at hand, and also really appreciated their patience with me as I stumbled thru my sentences with them. To learn more about them you can follow them on Twitter, where they post active updates, news, and analysis @IAF_FAI or go to their website iaf-fai.org where they post more in depth articles about Indigenous struggle all around the world. If you do the Twitter follows, just note that there is an active fake account that is attempting to badmouth and discredit the work of the IAF, and this account has the handle @fai-mujer; their interventions have been confusing to followers of the IAF in the past. To see a full account of this situation, plus of course many more topics that are like not about internet trolls but are about the work, you can visit them at iaf-fai.org! To learn more about the Convergence, to register, and for tips for outsider participation, you can visit taalahooghan.org. If in listening to this you are curious about whose land you were born on or live on, a fantastic resource for this is native-land.ca which provides a world wide map, insofar as it's possible, of indigenous lands and the names of their people spanning thousands of miles. For more great interviews with members of IAF, including words from Bad Salish Girl and Green City: Rev Left Radio Coffee With Comrades   A list of recommendations from B and e: -Do some digging and research to find a bunch of recent authors who have done the work to center Indigenaity and decolonization, -read the complete works of Cutcha Risling Baldy on Decolonized and Indigenous Feminism, -Talk to and listen to Indigenous people, do the necessary research to not ask folks to perform unnecessary emotional labor. Books: Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (en Espanol Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina) Indigenous Peoples History of the United States by Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Our History Is The Future by Nick Estes 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance by Gord Hill Some good podcasts, recommended by William of TFS, from Indigenous folks, while not being politically anarchist identified are good to listen to! All My Relations by Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene While Indigenous by the NDN Collective Stay tuned next week for an interview with Kanahus Manuel, a Secwepemc woman fighting a pipeline thru her lands in so called BC! CIMA Speaks about ICE Raids But first up Bursts spoke with Bruno Hinojosa Ruiz of the local immigrants advocacy group, CIMA, about the threatened raids by ICE and  CPB, ways for folks to get plugged in wherever they are with defending  their communities and helping those most targeted and strengthening our  bonds. More about CIMA can be found online by searching C I M A W N C on  facebook or at their site cimawnc.org. After the conversation,  Bursts learned that there's a wiki page that's compiling ICE offices and companies profiting from Immigrations police and Border Patrol. That  wiki can be found and added to at https://trackingice.com/wiki/Main_Page   Rest In Power, Willem In related news to the ramping up of ICE repression of people around the so-called US, protests, sit-ins and sabotages of profiteers have been on the rise. Much of this can be tracked by visiting https://itsgoingdown.org/closethecamps/. Of note, in Asheville someone claimed responsibility for damaging an atm owned by PNC and claiming it anonymously on IGD. Also, on Saturday, July 13th, a 69 year old, northwest anarchist named Willem Van Spronsen was gunned down by authorities outside of the North West Detention Center in Tacoma, WA while attempting to destroy buses used by GEO group to transport detainees to and from the center. Willem was allegedly armed with a rifle and was attempting to arson the buses when pigs opened fire and ended his life. There's a statement by a local group focused on shutting down the facility, La Resistencia, up on fedbook and linked in our show notes. We're sorry to lose you, Willem, but proud of your motivation.  . ... . .. playlist pending

Charles Mann (@CharlesCMann) is a science-focused journalist and award-winning author. He's the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus which won the National Academies Communication Award for best book of the year which he followed up with 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Charles has co-authored four books, is contributing editor for Science, The Atlantic Monthly, and Wired and has also written for Fortune, NYTimes, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He is a three-time National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of writing awards from the American Bar Association, the American Institute of Physics, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2018, Mann published The Wizard and the Prophet, which details two competing theories about the future of agriculture, population, and the environment.You can listen right here on iTunesIn today's episode we discuss: * The important distinctions between today's wizards and prophets on the future * What are the biggest risks of geoengineering * Why the future of agriculture is inevitably GMOs, and why that's a good thing * How we can design a better, more 21st-century government * Ways to change the incentives and structures governing society to automatically attack climate change * The reason social media is a cesspool and what to do about it * What are the biggest myths about the history of the Americas * Thoughts on clean meat, mass agriculture and more... * How do we handle growing inequality * Why the West was never won * The reason libertarianism and communism are two sides of the same coin * Why there's such a distrust of science to the detriment of all * What is there to be hopeful about emissions and the environmentMake a Tax-Deductible Donation to Support The DisruptorsThe Disruptors is supported by the generosity of its readers and listeners. If you find our work valuable, please consider supporting us on Patreon, via Paypal or with DonorBox powered by Stripe.Donate  

New York Times bestselling historian Charles C. Mann is perhaps best known for his ground-breaking 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. As the name suggests, 1491 challenges and […]

New York Times bestselling historian Charles C. Mann is perhaps best known for his ground-breaking 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. As the name suggests, 1491 challenges and corrects long-held assumptions about the indigenous peoples who populated the New World before European colonization. It won the prestigious National Academies Best Book Award. Mann’s meticulously researched follow-up, 1493: Uncovering […]

New York Times bestselling historian Charles C. Mann is perhaps best known for his ground-breaking 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. As the name suggests, 1491 challenges and corrects long-held assumptions about the indigenous peoples who populated the New World before European colonization. It won the prestigious National Academies Best Book Award. Mann’s […]

“What does forgiveness look like? What does loving your neighbor look like? I think … one of the reasons we have this physical creation is so that God could demonstrate what forgiveness looks like, what neighborliness looks like. And guess what? Forgiveness does not look like a farm that has to use more and more drugs all the time to keep its animals healthy. Forgiving is not a farm that has to use more chemicals to keep its soil healthy or keep the bugs away. A forgiving farm is one that has resilience.” Joel Salatin is the self-proclaimed ‘Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer’ behind Polyface Farms, a $3M operation in Swoop, Virginia, serving more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets and a farmers’ market with its salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry and forestry products. Feature in both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food, Inc., Polyface is known for its environmentally-friendly farming practices modeled around the natural systems of the biological world. Joel also serves as the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, the writer of the Pitchfork Pulpit column in Mother Earth News, and the author of 12 books, including The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation and Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. Today, Joel joins Ross and Christophe to share his practice of duplicating nature’s patterns on the farmscape. He offers his take on the flaws in the environmentalist approach to climate change and where the Christian faith community, libertarians, and economists fall short. Joel also describes how the regulatory environment is prejudiced against small-scale operations, exploring the way oversight stifles innovation. Listen in for Joel’s insight on food choice as a human right and learn how to take responsibility for your own consumer choices around food!   Resources Polyface Farms Joel’s Daily Blog: The Lunatic Farmer The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollen Food, Inc.Documentary Living Soils Symposium The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation by Joel Salatin 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin Milton Friedman The Jungle by Upton Sinclair F.A. Hayek Michael Pollan Carbon Removal Newsroom Review RCC on iTunes   Connect with Ross & Christophe Nori Nori on Facebook Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Email hello@nori.com Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes   Key Takeaways  [0:39] Joel’s path to reversing climate change Grew up on family farm in Shenandoah Valley of VA Grown to $3M business with 20 full-time staff [2:44] Joel’s farming practices Duplicate nature’s pattern on farmscape Mimic way animals moved (choreography) [6:06] How humans have pillaged the land War consequence of exploitation of resources More weight of animals 500 years ago than today [8:09] The idea of active management Use hands, intellectual ability to heal land Environmentalism by participation (not abandonment) [9:49] Joel’s criticism of the environmentalist approach Assumes elite know more than crowd Oversight prejudicial to small-scale operations Oversight unnecessary with real-time feedback loop [18:28] Why Joel is an advocate for food emancipation Regulatory oversight demands something that harms us Food choice as much human right as other freedoms [21:42] Joel’s criticism of the Christian faith community Power over vs. responsibility to environment Hypocrisy drives people away from religion [28:20] Joel’s criticism of libertarians Fails to recognize ‘it takes a village’ Farming should leave MORE commons [31:02] The danger in measuring GDP alone Views prisons, soil liability, etc. as assets No way to account for asset losses + liability incursions [33:52] Why Joel wants to eliminate crop insurance and subsidies Picks winners and losers in marketplace Power stacked to promote orthodoxy [39:46] How to take responsibility for your consumer choices Movement defined by participants Question orthodoxy, rewarded with access [45:33] The innovation around Joel’s eggmobile Portable henhouse follows cows’ movement Serve as biological pasture sanitizers + produce eggs

This is a rant on things that have been on my mind the last few weeks. This episode was hard to get started. I was nervous and got more comfortable about two thirds into it. Lots of references, books, song links below. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links and I receive a commission if you visit a link and buy something on my recommendation. This doesn’t cost you any extra, and I only recommend products I trust and find useful.  Mentioned: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann   https://amzn.to/2u89BdI (affiliate link) A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present  by Howard Zinn  https://amzn.to/2UFIty8 (affiliate link) These two books tell you the history we were not taught in school. I can't recommend these books enough. Cheo Feliciano - Anacaona (Yo Soy La Salsa) https://youtu.be/OvQArMzHt90 no le pegue a la negra joe arroyo https://youtu.be/PqmLPeL8aj4 John Leguizamo's Latin History For Morons https://www.netflix.com/title/80225421 https://youtu.be/23Q2-1AYJCs Want to learn more about your personality? I like these and they are free: https://www.tonyrobbins.com/disc/ https://www.16personalities.com/ Please take a minute to leave me a rating or review on iTunes. This helps me a lot to get discovered by other listeners especially since I am starting out. If you like my podcast please share it. Thank you! iTunes:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/introverts-galaxy/id1381335095?mt=2 Richard Leyba Tejada Instagram @IntrovertsGalaxy contact@IntrovertsGalaxy.com Subscribe to podcast: IntrovertsGalaxy.com #ownyourstory, #justbe, #courage, #socialanxiety, #personalgrowth, #yougotthis, #youarenotalone #selflove, #selfawareness, #introvert, #selfesteem, #confidence, #confident, #mindful, #selfdiscovery, #onoursleeves, #sensitive, #emotions, #anacaona, #awarak, #motivation, #mentalhealth, #awkward, #dominicanrepublic, #taino, #1491, #Columbus, #haiti, #infj, #bravingthewilderness

Jason Twill has a career spanning over 20 years in urban development. Jason has been at the forefront of built environment transformation. His career experience includes delivery of sustainable mixed-income housing projects throughout New York City, delivery of Vulcan Inc.'s South Lake Union Innovation District in Seattle, Washington, and serving as Head of Sustainability and Innovation for Lendlease in Australia. In 2016, Jason was appointed as an Innovation Fellow and Senior Lecturer within the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney and leads research into regenerative urbanism, housing affordability, and property economics. Jason was designated a LEED Fellow by the United States Green Building Council in 2014, and he was named a Next City Global Urban Vanguard in both 2015 and 2017. Jason is also an appointed Champion and advisor to Nightingale Housing in Australia.   Love for NYC Jason was born just outside of Philadelphia and grew up on the east coast.  He then moved to Columbia, Maryland, before he moved again to a suburb outside of New York City, during high school.  Where Jason grew up shaped his passion for the built environment and his desire to transform it. “My father worked in New York, and I think I grew up hating the suburbs and the monoculture status to it of car dominant environments.  I think experiencing New York City as a young adolescent and teenager really introduced me to tolerance, diversity, language, ethnicity and all these different things and I just fell in love with the city.” - Jason Twill   September 11, 2001 Jason fell in love with architecture and construction.  He was working in New York for an architecture firm and was planning to go to school at Columbia.  In 2001, Jason was working for Mass and Duffy in the World Trade Center during the attacks and barely escaped.  He postponed going to graduate school due to the aftermath of 9-11.   Shifting from Architecture to Real Estate Jason began to gravitate towards real estate development.  He wanted to be a change agent around sustainability, social responsibility, and development in cities.  Jason was pushing people to get affordable housing. “I remember a lot of us getting made fun of. There was a cluster of us that we're incubating the urban green, the green building chapter of New York City, and just kind of fighting to have a voice to educate the building industry, the architects, and the engineers.” - Jason Twill Urban Apostles Founder Jason is founder and Director of Urban Apostles, a start-up real estate development and consulting services business specialising in regenerative development and deliberative housing models for cities. Urban Apostles' work focuses on the intersection of the sharing economy and the art of city making. He is a co-founder of both the International Living Future Institute and Green Sports Alliance as well as an originator of the Economics of Change project. In 2017, Jason founded and launched the City Makers' Guild, an education, advocacy and research group promoting more equitable and inclusive cities.   Book Recommendations The Geography of Nowhere:  The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler Dark Emu:  Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture by Bruce Pascoe Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond 1491:  New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann The Well Tempered City by Jonathan Rose Garrison Institute Tune into this podcast to listen to the rest of Jason Twill's amazing journey in this podcast hosted by Charlie.   Connect with Jason Twill: Linkedin   Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES: Charlie on LinkedIn Green Building Educational Services GBES on Twitter Connect on LinkedIn Like on Facebook Google+ GBES Pinterest Pins GBES on Instagram   Announcement:  GBMS is excited our membership community is growing.  Consider joining our membership community as members will be given access to some of the guests on the podcasts that you can ask project questions to, if you are preparing for an exam there will be more insurances that you will pass your next exam, you will be given cliff notes if you are a member and so much more.   If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on iTunes.  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the Green Building Matters Podcast!   Copyright © 2019 GBES

It's a full house on the podcast today. Felix Landry, Tim Wright, and Kevin Shepherd join Jordan to talk about our favorite reads and listens from the year. Here are links to the stuff we talked about in the show: Tim's picks: There’s a missing middle for commercial spaces, too – Kevin Klinkenberg, The Messy City What’s Up with All Those Empty Commercial Storefronts in New Mixed-Use Developments? – Rachel Quednau, Strong Towns Podcast: Typology with Ian Morgan Cron (We also discuss his book The Road Back to You) Felix's picks: Building Jerusalem: Christianity and New Urbanism – Kathleen Curran Sweeney, Public Discourse The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles Mann Jordan's picks: Book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Book: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse Blog: Mr. Money Mustache Blog: Brain Pickings Podcast: On Being with Krista Tippett Podcast: Philosophize This! Podcast: Akimbo, from Seth Godin Kevin's picks: The Big Sort by Bill Bishop The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt Building a Vibrant Community by Quint Studer The Art of Explanation by Lee LeFever Strong Towns blog Farnam Street blog Podcast: Strong Towns Podcast: Entreleadership Podcast: Serial Podcast: Building Local Power (ILSR)

This week, we’re off to Greendale to spend some time with the new Netflix series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina! The latest incarnation of the teenage witch who originated in comics in the early 1960s and who famously had her own TV show in the 1990s, The Chilling Adventures takes a creepier approach, with plenty of references to Satan and all manner of genuinely scary and sinister happenings plaguing the mere mortal townsfolk of Greendale. Our conversation touches on the show’s attempts to establish its feminist bonafides, its handling of characters of color and a character who is gender-nonconforming, the ways in which it tries to be simultaneously scary and silly, and more. SEGMENT TIMESTAMPS: 01:40 Entertainment News: Women kiss at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; transphobic responses to Dwight Howard allegations 09:20 The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina 39:40 What’s Your FREQ-Out? RELEVANT LINKS: In Defense of Prudence Night on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina by Angelica Bastien: https://www.vulture.com/2018/11/chilling-adventures-of-sabrina-prudence-black-witches.html 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Columbus-ebook/dp/B000JMKVE4 A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn: https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-ebook/dp/B015XEWZHI

Hint: if you want to skip right to the giveaway jump ahead to 17:00 into the episode!Egg cooker timer thingBen and Jerry's "The Tonight Dough,” AKA the greatest ice cream flavor ever conceived by human hands.Nailed it on NetflixThe Dark Ages on via the Encyclopedia Britannica (NOT wikipedia)1491: New Revelations of The Americas Before Columbus (on Amazon) // This is basically a textbook, but it will blow your mind nonetheless.The “Nashville” episode of Drunk History on Hulu.Miley and Dolly rock out on “Rainbowland” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“Now I have a whole new group of people to be disappointed in me!” Chris talks about his wild childhood “some people grow up thinking of their mother making pies… my mom did heroin. That’s just part of what I remember about her.” and how taking a DNA test and getting in touch with his Father’s Family at age 30 has changed his outlook for the future. “Now I think about having kids… I never considered that before.”Follow Chris on IG and twitter @comicchrisadamsEmail us @ andrealoveseverybody@gmail.com for show pitches, ideas, comments, etcFollow us on Instagram @andrealoveseverybody and twitter @andrealovespodFollow me @sundresscomic for show updates and sweet snapsSOURCES: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“Now I have a whole new group of people to be disappointed in me!” Chris talks about his wild childhood “some people grow up thinking of their mother making pies… my mom did heroin. That’s just part of what I remember about her.” and how taking a DNA test and getting in touch with his Father’s Family at age 30 has changed his outlook for the future. “Now I think about having kids… I never considered that before.”Follow Chris on IG and twitter @comicchrisadamsEmail us @ andrealoveseverybody@gmail.com for show pitches, ideas, comments, etcFollow us on Instagram @andrealoveseverybody and twitter @andrealovespodFollow me @sundresscomic for show updates and sweet snapsSOURCES: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles Mann is a historian and a journalist, whose books include 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. His most recent work is The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. It’s a book about how humans use science, technology, and policy to confront our impact on the planet and, ultimately, our own survival as a species. In this interview, you’ll learn what wizards and prophets are, why the scale of a given technology might be more important to us than the technology itself, and whether humans have a special role in the Universe.

Covering the Americas prior to Columbus, we destroy some myths about native American peoples, including how they arrived and the size of native American population. Some of the resources used to create this episode:Charles Mann, 1491. Stuart J. Fiedel, “The Peopling of the New World: Present Evidence, New Theories, and Future Directions” in Journal of Archeological Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2000. Robert Remini, A Short History of the United States.

Listen to The Michael Imhotep Show, Tues. Oct., 13th, 10pm-12midnight EST with host Michael Imhotep of The African History Network. We'll discuss CALL IN WITH Questions/Comments at 1-888-669-2281.  POST YOUR COMMENTS.  WE MAY READ THEM ON AIR.  Listen online at http://tunein.com/radio/Empowerment-Radio-Network-s199313/ or by downloading the "TuneIn Radio" app to your smartphone and search for "Empowerment Radio Network" or at www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com.                                                                                      1) Paul Taylor of the Detroit Million Man March Alumni Association will talk about their upcoming 20th Anniversary Celebration this Friday.  2) We'll continues our discussion of the “Justice or Else” Rally this past Saturday.  3) Monday was Columbus Day.  We'll deal with numerous evidence proving that African People were in the Americas long before Columbus. 4) A Prarie View, Texas City Councilman was arrested and tase recently.  4) This date in African American History.

Our favorite books that we read in 2014: Karl – “Saga” volumes 1 – 3, “Anne of Green Gables”, “1492 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”, “Beautiful Music for Ugly Children”, and “Mr. Penumber’s 24 Hour Book Store.” Cathie…Read more →

We are so much better than kissing a horse. Less whiskers. Our indi reviews. Karl – “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” by Charles C. Mann Jenny – “Wild Things” by Clay Carmichael Adrienne – Rory Gilmore’s reading…Read more →

Charles C. Mann didn't plan to write about the world before and after Columbus, but, at a certain point, he realized he couldn't wait for anyone else to do it. In his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Mr. Mann relentlessly dispels the myths of Native American life in the Americas before Columbus made landfall in 1492. Although native Americans are often depicted living in an untouched wilderness, the reality of native American life was very different. They transformed their environment, built empires, made war and invented two technologies that would prove vital to Europe's rise: the potato and the corn plant. In his book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Mr. Mann describes how Columbus' arrival in the new world set off the exchange of species between the Americas and the rest of the world. After centuries of relentless plant breeding, the peoples of the new world had transformed the minimally useful ancestors of corn and potatoes into the most productive food-producing technologies in the world. Europe--for centuries in the grip of famine--was finally able to free itself from the struggle for survival, grow its population and usher in the modern world. In China, the sweet potato allowed previously sparsely-inhabited regions to become major population centers. In the Americas, diseases like smallpox created a Native American apocalypse while diseases like malaria would incentivize the development of a slavery based on the forced importation of West African peoples. The roots of our modern world can be traced to the exchange of a few key species. Drawing together the latest scientific research from biology, history, archaeology and anthropology, in this episode Mr. Mann paints a vision of the world that might allow us to finally transcend the narrative of race and allow us to finally see all the peoples of the past as they truly were: just like us.1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created are both available on Amazon and through all good booksellers.

Ever since Columbus, it’s an alien invasive world. Everybody’s germs, insects, vegetables, staple foods, rats, domestic animals, and even wildlife went everywhere, changing everything. That convulsion is still in progress. Charles C. Mann is the author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.