Podcast appearances and mentions of Charles C Mann

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 every generation, important people predict that the end is near and the apocalypse is coming. In the 1960s, the fear was that population growth would destroy the planet—that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The most famous warning was 'The Population Bomb,' a bestselling book published in 1968 by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and “hundreds of millions of people would starve to death” in the 1970s. But then the 1970s came and went. And global famine deaths didn't rise. They declined by 90 percent. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the 1990s. And again in the 2000s. The apocalypse that everybody said was coming never came. And the reason is, basically, we invented super wheat. In the 1950s and 1960s, a plant pathologist named Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico on fungus-resistant wheat on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, managed to create a breed of wheat that was super abundant, efficient, and disease-resistant. His work kickstarted what's known as the Green Revolution, a movement whose discoveries are responsible for keeping roughly half the planet alive. In 2007, when Borlaug was 93, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had “arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.” Today's guest is Charles C. Mann, a journalist and author. We talk about the long history of the Green Revolution. Who was Norman Borlaug? What did he actually do? How did he do it? What does his accomplishment teach us about science, invention, and progress? We're at a moment today when American science is being cut to the bone while foreign aid is being slashed. I sometimes hear the question: What is foreign aid really worth to us? I think it's important to remember that Norman Borlaug was a foundation-funded scientist who didn't do his most important work in air-conditioned labs at Harvard or Johns Hopkins. His breakthroughs came in lean-to shacks in Mexico, where he worked to improve harvests. Without Borlaug's accomplishments, the world would look very different: Famines might trigger migration that destabilizes countries and transforms global politics. The world we have today, where countries like China and India can easily feed their huge populations, is a gift to global stability, to humanity, to America. It grew from the seed of a foreign agricultural support program. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles C. Mann Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 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On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Lisa Jackson, an award-winning filmmaker, whose work spans hybrid documentary, installation, VR, and more. Am and Lisa discuss her latest work, Wilfred Buck, a portrait of Cree Elder Wilfred Buck, an Indigenous star lore expert. They also talk about her time as an undergraduate student at SFU and her journey as a filmmaker. Full episode details: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/261-lisa-jackson.html Read the transcript: https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/261-lisa-jackson.html Resources: Lisa Jackson: https://www.lisajackson.ca/ Door Number 3: https://doornumber3.ca/ Wilfred Buck: https://doornumber3.ca/wilfred-buck/ Transmissions: https://doornumber3.ca/transmissions/ Biidaaban: https://doornumber3.ca/biidaaban-first-light/ Suckerfish: https://www.lisajackson.ca/Suckerfish Bio: Lisa Jackson lives in Toronto and is Anishinaabe from Aamjiwnaang First Nation. Her award-winning work has screened at CPH:DOX, Sundance, Berlinale Forum Expanded, SXSW, Camden, Hotdocs, Tribeca, BFI London, the Melbourne Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and broadcast widely. She's made works ranging from current affairs to IMAX, animation to VR, and even a residential school musical. In 2021 she received the Documentary Organization of Canada's Vanguard Award and in 2022 she was selected for a Chicken & Egg Award. Her 2024 hybrid feature documentary Wilfred Buck premiered in the DOX:AWARD section at CPH:DOX and was a top five audience pick at Hot Docs and won Best Canadian Film at Calgary Film Festival and the Women Inmate Jury Award at RIDM. Her short Lichen screened at Sundance in 2020 and Indictment: The Crimes of Shelly Chartier is one of the top watched documentaries on CBC, won the 2017 imagineNATIVE Best Doc award and was also co-produced by Lisa. Her Webby-nominated VR Biidaaban: First Light premiered at Tribeca Storyscapes in 2018, exhibited internationally to 25,000+ people, and won a Canadian Screen Award (Canada's Oscar), the second time she's received this honour. Transmissions, a 6000-square-foot immersive multimedia installation and sister project to Biidaaban, premiered in Vancouver in 2019 and was featured on the cover of The Georgia Straight. In 2016, she directed the VR Highway of Tears for CBC Radio's The Current which was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists award. In 2015 she was drama director for the 8 x 1 hour APTN/ZDF docudrama series 1491: The Untold Story Of The Americas Before Columbus, based on the bestselling book by Charles C. Mann, which was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award. She has an MFA in Film Production from York University (thesis prize) and is an alumna of the TIFF Talent and Writers Labs, Canadian Film Centre's Directors Lab, IDFA Summer School, CFC/NFB/Ford Foundation's Open Immersion VR Lab, and was a Fellow at the MIT Open Doc Lab. Cite this episode: Chicago Style Johal, Am. “Star Stories — with Lisa Jackson.” Below the Radar, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Podcast audio, February 4, 2025. https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/episodes/261-lisa-jackson.html.

Neal Stephenson, visionary speculative fiction author and long-time friend of Long Now, joined us for a conversation with journalist Charles C. Mann on the research behind his new novel Polostan, the dawn of the Atomic Age, and the craft of historical storytelling. Polostan is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light - an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic from Stephenson, whose prior books include Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle

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 ===============

This was my first time meeting Taylor Keen and I absolutely hope to have him out to the farm sometime for more. He is an incredible bridge to not just indigenous wisdom, but wisdom at large. He's the author of an incredible book, "Rediscovering Turtle Island", which I am chewing through. He also founded the organization Sacred Seed which is dedicated to preserving agricultural seeds indigenous to Turtle Island. Hopefully we get into it in the next one. Today though, was an incredible history/cultural lesson from Taylor. Can't wait to have ya back brother.   Connect with Taylor: Website: RediscoveringTurtleIsland.com  Instagram: @taylorkeen7    Show Notes: "1491" -Charles C Mann  "1493" -Charles C Mann    Sponsors: Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Caldera Lab is the best in men's skincare. Head over to calderalab.com/KKP to get any/all of their regimen. Use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off Bioptimizers To get the 'Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu  Paleovalley Some of the best and highest quality goodies I personally get into are available at paleovalley.com, punch in code “KYLE” at checkout and get 15% off everything! - Optimized Paleo Podcast  To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn't.

From May 7, 2021. Two new studies used data from Cassini's Grand Finale observations of Saturn and found that the magnetic fields and a wave in the rings provide insight into the core structure and composition of the gas giant. Plus, cosmic rays, how Mayans shaped the Earth, and a review of books by Charles C. Mann.   We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs.  Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too!  Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations.  Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.

Annelies en Joris pikten 'Het boek dat iedereen van wie je houdt zou moeten lezen' van Philipa Perry uit, gasten Hugo Matthysen en Ish Ait Hamou namen respectievelijk '1491' van Charles C. Mann en 'Over cinema' van Marc Didden mee. Zijn deze non-fictieboeken leesbaar? Ontdek het in deze aflevering, live vanop FAAR in Oostende.

#15 Bioromeo is geen bioromeo Deze week schuift bij Joris, Hidde, Karsten regenboogwortelboer

#8 Een regenworm is geen cheerleader In de achtste aflevering van ETEN IS WETEN

Chapter 1 What's 1493 Book by Charles С. MannThe book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" is written by Charles C. Mann. It was published in 2011 and explores the global impact of Columbus' arrival in the Americas in 1492. Mann examines the widespread ecological, economic, and cultural changes that occurred as a result of the Columbian Exchange, which refers to the exchange of plants, animals, diseases, and ideas between the Old World (Europe, Africa, and Asia) and the New World (the Americas). The book sheds light on how this exchange shaped the modern world and transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.Chapter 2 Is 1493 Book A Good Book"1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles C. Mann is generally considered a well-researched and well-written book. It explores the global impact of Christopher Columbus' expeditions in 1492 and the subsequent exchange of goods, diseases, and ideas between the Old World and the New World. It offers an intriguing exploration of the interconnectedness of world history. Ultimately, whether or not it is a "good" book depends on your personal interests and preferences.Chapter 3 1493 Book by Charles С. Mann SummaryThe book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created" by Charles C. Mann explores the consequences of Christopher Columbus's voyages to the Americas in 1492. In this book, Mann seeks to challenge the common belief that Columbus's arrival in the Americas marked the beginning of European dominance in the New World.Mann argues that Columbus's voyages not only resulted in the exchange of goods, people, and diseases between the Old World and the New World but also created a complex, interdependent global network. He examines how Columbus's discovery of the Americas influenced the development of modern capitalism, the rise of global trade, the spread of diseases like smallpox, and the transformation of ecosystems.The book is divided into several sections, each examining a different aspect of the post-Columbian world. Mann explores the role of the Americas in the European economy, particularly the impact of American silver and American crops like tobacco, sugar, and potatoes. He also delves into the effects of the Columbian Exchange—the exchange of plants, animals, and diseases—on both the Old World and the New World.Mann argues that the introduction of American crops like maize and potatoes led to population growth in Europe and Asia. He also explores the devastating impact of diseases brought from Europe on Indigenous populations, estimating that as many as 95% of Native Americans died due to European diseases like smallpox.Furthermore, the book examines the ecological consequences of Columbus's voyages. Mann explores how the introduction of American plants and animals in various parts of the world drastically transformed ecosystems and influenced the development of agriculture. He also examines the effects of deforestation and the slave trade on the Americas.Throughout the book, Mann challenges the notion that Columbus's voyages were solely beneficial, arguing that they were a double-edged sword. While the exchange of goods and knowledge had positive effects, the book highlights the devastating consequences for Indigenous populations and the environment.In summary, "1493" by Charles C. Mann provides a comprehensive analysis of the wide-ranging effects of Columbus's voyages on the Americas and the world. It explores the economic, ecological, and social consequences of the Columbian Exchange, challenging traditional narratives of European dominance and emphasizing the complex interactions between different cultures and ecosystems. Chapter 4 1493 Book Author

Samenvatting In de nieuwste aflevering van ETEN IS WETEN verwelkomen we Charles C. Mann, een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse auteur en journalist. Mann, bekend van zijn baanbrekende werk in The Atlantic en The New York Times, brengt een cruciaal perspectief op de Nederlandse stikstofcrisis, die hij beschouwt als een wereldwijd probleem van dezelfde orde als klimaatverandering. We bespreken hoe Nederland, door eigen problemen aan te pakken, wereldwijde oplossingen kan bieden, waarmee de stikstofcrisis zelfs een mondiaal businessmodel zou kunnen worden. Duik met ons in de diepte van fermentatie als redder van ons oerwoud, de transformatie van landbouw naar laboratoriumvoedsel, tot het gebruik van precisiefermentatie voor efficiëntere voedselproductie. We bespreken de evolutie van de groene revolutie: Hoeveel Haber-Bosch zit er in jouw eten? Zet je schrap voor een rit door het landschap van moderne voedselproductie, waarbij we niet alleen ons bord, maar ook onze wereld opnieuw vormgeven.

#1 -  Speculaas is geen landbouwgif ETEN IS WETEN is een wekelijkse voedselpodcast waarin de zin en onzin van de voedselwereld aan de kaak wordt gesteld. Onze gastheren Joris, Hidde en Karsten fileren, samen met een selectie van deskundige en ondeskundige gasten, de voor de hand liggende en soms complexe voedselthema's van vandaag. In de geest van ‘horen, zien en zwijgen', geven zij ons een frisse kijk op duurzame voedselkwesties. Schuif aan en laat je geest voeden en je ziel drinken. Dit alles wordt op je bord gelegd dankzij Stop the Food Fight, een platform dat zich richt op een nieuw, duurzaam voedselverhaal.  Samenvatting In de openingsaflevering van ETEN IS WETEN ontrafelen Joris, Karsten en Hidde drie intrigerende feiten uit de voedselwereld. Ze verkennen de potentie voor een onverwachte alliantie tussen Extinction Rebellion en de conventionele landbouw, die ondanks gedeelde belangen gehinderd wordt door het verhitte debat over glyfosaat. Daarnaast overwegen ze de voordelen van een antiek Pompeiaans eetpatroon als een creatieve strategie tegen voedselverspilling. Tot slot graven ze diep in het onderwerp van voedselprijsspeculatie en hoe deze paradox leidt tot honger in een wereld die eigenlijk overloopt van voedsel. Luister naar ETEN IS WETEN voor een smakelijke mix van feiten, diepgang en oplossingen

Arrancamos una nueva temporada de Por las Rutas conversando sobre una fecha tan simbólica como polémica: el 12 de octubre, aniversario de la llegada de Cristóbal Colón a nuestro continente... ¿Qué debemos recordar en este día?; ¿es una fecha de reflexión, conmemoración o celebración?; ¿podemos considerar que hubo un genocidio en tierras americanas? ¡Gracias a nuestros Patreons que hacen posible llegar semana a semana con los episodios de Por las Rutas! Para ser parte de nuestro Patreon, visita: https://www.patreon.com/porlasrutasdelacuriosidad; también puedes apoyarnos mediante Yape o Plin: https://bit.ly/2WVpqGc. REFERENCIAS: La conquista biológica: las enfermedades en el Nuevo Mundo, 1492-1650, Noble David Cook; Siglo XXI, edición impresa, 2005 La conquista de la identidad: México y España, 1521-1910, Tomás Pérez Vejo y Alejandro Salafranca; Turner, edición digital, 2021 Demographic collapse: Indian Peru, 1520-1620, Noble David Cook; Cambridge University Press, edición reimpresa, 2004 1491: una historia de las Américas antes de Colón, Charles C. Mann; Capitán Swing Libros, edición digital, 2022 https://wmagazin.com/esteban-mira-caballos-en-america-no-hubo-genocidio-pero-si-etnocidio/ https://www.larepublica.ec/blog/2020/10/16/hispanidad-o-hispanofilia/ https://www.eldebate.com/historia/20230201/papel-asociaciones-hispanistas-america_90082.html https://gaceta.es/actualidad/la-cruz-de-borgona-en-lima-peruanos-defienden-la-herencia-espanola-frente-al-vandalismo-indigenista-20211018-1154/ https://estebanmira.weebly.com/uploads/7/9/5/0/7950617/lacatolicaylosindios.pdf https://estebanmira.weebly.com/uploads/7/9/5/0/7950617/terror.pdf https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-60224535 https://nuso.org/articulo/estatuas-historia-memoria/ https://elpais.com/internacional/2022-09-25/las-estatuas-mas-incomodas-de-america.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/post-opinion/2020/06/17/qu-opinan-las-estatuas-de-coln-sobre-el-racismo-en-amrica-latina/ https://historiauned.net/doc/Origen_epidemias_conquista.PDF https://web.archive.org/web/20070812153403/http://www.artehistoria.jcyl.es/histesp/contextos/6694.htm https://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/index.php/historica/article/view/8762/9147 https://revistas.urp.edu.pe/index.php/Illapa/article/view/2589/2614 https://argumentos-historico.iep.org.pe/articulos/la-independencia-peruana-memoria-e-historia/ MÚSICA UTILIZADA EN ESTE PROGRAMA (TODOS LOS DERECHOS PERTENECEN A LOS AUTORES, COMPOSITORES Y/O INTÉRPRETES) Danza de tijeras, Wayanay / Autor: Danza folklórica de los departamentos de Apurímac, Ayacucho y Huancavelica Enchanting adventures, Jay Man / Autor: Jay Man

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. 

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_c_mann_how_will_we_survive_when_the_population_hits_10_billion ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/202-academic-words-reference-from-charles-c-mann-how-will-we-survive-when-the-population-hits-10-billion-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/nQ2zd1-SZBE (All Words) https://youtu.be/O4ojMGait14 (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/cAzvCYswRME (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

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

Just as the political spectrum is divided between left and right, thinking on environmental problem solving is similarly split into two rival camps exemplified by the archetypes of the Wizard and the Prophet. Award winning science writer Charles Mann explores these archetypes as personified by the father of the Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug and the intellectual godfather of the environmental movement, William Vogt. Crudely put wizards are foremost humanists who eschew limits believing that our growing population and appetites can be accommodated by the wise application of decoupling technology. Prophets are foremost environmentalists who believe that carrying capacity is limited and that humans must remain within natural energy flows or risk ecosystem and civilizational collapse. Understanding the origins of one's opponents ideological beliefs and values goes a long way to depersonalizing a sometimes ugly debate and perhaps finding a small patch of common ground. Prophets who have contributed some impressive advances in natural resource stewardship such as water conservation must wrestle with an ugly history of Malthusian ideas which at their worst have justified horrific campaigns of coercive population control. Despite the success of technofixes that fed billions and averted famines wizards must temper their scientific rationalism with a sociologic understanding of the dark sides of modernization such as enclosures of the commons.

"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

Neal Stephenson is a best-selling author, futurist, tech geek and swordsman whose works include Cryptonomicron, Seveneves, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash. He has also co-written several other books and graphic novels which we discuss in this episode. His latest book, Termination Shock goes into depth and detail about Sikh martial arts, which he had to research during the Covid lockdowns. Of course, Neal's main claim to fame is that he wrote the preface to my own Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers and Martial Artists. We cover an enormously wide range of topics in this episode, from fountain pens to working with Jeff Bezos building rockets. If you want to find anything in particular, the timestamps and related links are listed below: [03:07] How Neal got into swords. Neal's club in Seattle is Lonin. [08:12] Ellis Amdur and Japanese martial arts. [14:31] Bartitsu [17:53] Silver and McBane. Note: It was Captain John Godfrey's 1747, A Treatise Upon The Useful Science of Defence, where he said that “The Small-Sword is the Call of Honour, the Back-Sword the Call of Duty.” [28:50] Indian Club training [37:46] Sword fights in fiction and how to write one [43:48] Working with Charles C. Mann on Cimarronin. The Manila Galleons. We mention Da'Mon Stith and episode 23 of this podcast. For the photo of Ellis Amdur sticking an eight foot spear into Neal's chest, see: https://swordschool.com/podcast/from-katanas-to-creating-the-metaverse-with-neal-stephenson/  [52:40] Fountain pens [55:38] How Neal plots, writes and edits his books, and how he co-writes with another author [1:01:09] How Neal's books changed culture – e.g. influenced the development of the Kindle (see Fiona image here: https://swordschool.com/podcast/from-katanas-to-creating-the-metaverse-with-neal-stephenson/ Fiona is a character in The Diamond Age. Amazon used the codename ‘Fiona' for their Kindle project.) [1:03:47] Working with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin finding better ways to power space rockets [1:14:05] Bullwhips [1:15:41] LAMINA1 and building a new open platform for metaverses [1:28:28] The best idea Neal hasn't acted on yet [1:32:14] What Neal would do with $1 million to improve historical martial arts For more information about the host Guy Windsor and his work, as well as transcriptions of all the episodes, check out his website at https://swordschool.com/podcast   And to support the show, come join the Patrons at  https://www.patreon.com/theswordguy

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.

In dieser Folge spricht Petra Hartlieb mit der Journalistin und Autorin Claudia Schumacher über ihren ersten Roman "Liebe ist gewaltig". Das Gespräch dreht sich um Gewalt in Beziehungen, warum Gewalt in allen gesellschaftlichen Milieus vorkommt und warum so schwierig ist, daraus zu entfliehen. Abschließend hat FALTER-Chefredakteur Florian Klenk noch ein paar Bücher über die Natur und ihre politische Dimension für Sie mitgebracht. Zu den Büchern: "Liebe ist gewaltig" von Claudia Schumacher: https://shop.falter.at/detail/9783423290159/liebe-ist-gewaltig "Dracula" von Bram Stoker: https://shop.falter.at/detail/9783969990667/dracula "Schweine. Ein Porträt" von Thomas Macho: https://shop.falter.at/detail/9783957570994/schweine "Insektopädie" von Hugh Raffles : https://shop.falter.at/detail/9783882210804/insektopaedie "Kolumbus' Erbe" von Charles C. Mann: https://shop.falter.at/detail/9783498045241/kolumbus-erbe "Amerika vor Kolumbus" von Charles C. Mann : https://shop.falter.at/detail/9783498045364/amerika-vor-kolumbus Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

Charles C. Mann, “1493 Amerikan Yerlilerinin Yok Edilen Uygarlığı”nda Alfred W. Crosby'in “Ekolojik Emperyalizm” adlı eserinden bahsediyor. Mann, Crosby'nin kitabından şu cümleyi alıntılamış: “Avrupalı göçmenler ve torunları her yere yayılmış, bunun açıklanması gerek.” Mann, bu cümleyi okuduğu zaman bitkilerin başka bir yere taşınması anlamına gelen biyolojik transplant kavramının mahiyetini anlamaya başladığını belirtiyor. Yazar daha önce bitkilerin başka yerlere taşınmasının önemini fark etmediğini özellikle vurguluyor.

¿Cómo era América en 1491, antes de la llegada de Colón? Mitos sugieren que el hemisferio estaba escasamente poblado por tribus nómadas que vivían con ligereza en la tierra y que la tierra era, en su mayor parte, un desierto. Eso es lo que la mayoría de nosotros aprendimos en la escuela, junto con algunos párrafos sobre culturas más desarrolladas en América Central y del Sur. La investigación de las últimas décadas sugiere, sin embargo, que las Américas eran el hogar de más personas que Europa cuando llegó Colón y que la mayoría vivía en sociedades complejas y altamente organizadas. En su libro titulado "1491: Nuevas revelaciones de las Américas antes de Colón", Charles C. Mann recopiló pruebas de la sofisticación de la América precolombina. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share The day after Christmas 2021, the great entomologist and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson died at the age of 92. Carl Zimmer in The New York Times wrote an obituary that highlighted his seminal early contributions to science, as well as his role as a public intellectual after the publication of 1975's Sociobiology. Wilson also wrote an autobiography, Naturalist, telling the story of his life in science from his own perspective. In the days after his passing, I wanted to touch base with those who knew him, collaborated with him, and even had disputes with him. The evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson (no genetic relation) has talked in his books about how he was influenced by the elder Wilson early in his career, and also how they eventually became colleagues and allies in scientific debates. Recently he published The Six Legacies of Edward O. Wilson as a reflection on E. O. Wilson's career and influence. These six were his contributions to evolutionary biology, biodiversity, human sociobiology, the unification of knowledge, his encouraging stance toward young scientists and other learners, and finally, the frontier of ecosystems studies (his very last project). David Sloan Wilson I've talked to David before about his work on multi-level selection as well as his ambition toward utilizing evolutionary biological frameworks in the context of social science and policy, so I reached out to discuss the piece he wrote about E. O. Wilson's life. Knowing that the elder Wilson had encouraged David's interest in group selection as a graduate student, I expected to focus on the late scientist's great contributions. But in fact, we addressed the reality that the elder Wilson often had greater aspirations than concrete paths of execution. No one can deny E. O. Wilson's original contributions to ecology and his mastery of entomology, but David Sloan Wilson points out that some of his recent books sketch out grand plans, but do not deliver any roadmap on how to achieve those ends. Rather than a hagiography, the conversation emphasizes that we shouldn't make icons out of scientists, that science is a collective enterprise, and that too often it is depicted as the products of singular “Great Men.” Nevertheless, over the course of the discussion, David Sloan Wilson and I do discuss the late Wilson's positive and important contributions to entomology and mentorship, as well as his last forays into scientific debates when he became involved in a controversy around the utility of W. D. Hamilton's inclusive fitness framework in 2010, and their collaboration in the 2000's on multi-level selection theory. Charles C. Mann One of the things about E. O. Wilson's life that many have observed was his great range. In addition to his contributions to evolutionary biology, over the last few decades of his life, Wilson became a promoter of conservation and biodiversity (a term he helped popularize in the late 1980's). But his activism was not without controversy. In the last third of the podcast, I talk to the science writer Charles C. Mann about his run-ins with Wilson in relation to environmentalism, where the scientist's love of nature seems to have driven him beyond what conservation biology may have entailed. Mann also recounts Wilson's dismissals of his pointed questions in relation to predictions made by his scientific theories about island biodiversity, reiterating that even the greatest of scientists are not necessarily dispassionate when it comes to their own scholarship.  Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share

Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Share This week on Unsupervised Learning Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet joins Razib, to delve into the history of the Americas, and a broader theme that runs through Mann's work – how human societies and their environment are inseparably intertwined.    Mann's work goes a long way towards dispelling the myth that the Americas were an untamed wilderness before the arrival of Europeans, scarcely populated and unshaped by the hand of man prior to Christopher Columbus. He describes a New World then peopled by complex societies with huge populations, possessing a well-developed toolkit of biological technologies for engineering the natural world, managing ecological succession, and diversifying food production strategy, all arguably superior to that of their European conquerors.   Ultimately, when the Old and New Worlds collided, it was the calamitous impact of disease, rather than a significant technological advantage in weaponry, that eased the European conquest of the Americas. Through highlighting the fall of the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan, which comprised the Aztec Empire, and the Wars of Succession of the Inca, Mann also provides insight into human choices that also contributed to the end of these societies.  During this pivotal period, for the first time, a global exchange of subsistence crops, slaves and luxury goods circulated throughout the whole world. The effects of the discovery of the New World were felt on every continent, as new crops were adopted in regions where they alleviated local food security issues and reshaped the local ecology (often increasing pressure on the landscape and further degrading it over time). As the world transitioned to the 20th century it was a precarious landscape of food insecurity that motivated William Vogt, whom Mann styles as “the Prophet,” to preach on the importance of environmental carrying capacity and overpopulation. In contrast, Mann's “Wizard,” agronomist Norman Borlaug, a pioneer of the technological techniques underpinning the Green Revolution, came to prominence applying science to enable our adaptive ingenuity in the face of ecological constraints.  For his part, Mann does not take sides or offer us a clear winner – but believes the discussion between these two intellectual strands to be of utmost importance when considering how we interpret our past and consider our future.  Subscribe now

On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, we interview Matt Reed. Matt is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, We talk about how his families military service factored into his fascination with history and ultimately pushing him to study history as an undergraduate. We then talk about his academic career and how he got started at the Oklahoma Historical Society and what the goal of the society is. We talk about his change of careers and what he does as the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer. Matt and Carlton then detail their experience at the 2021 Plains Conference in Boulder, Colorado. Links Pawnee Nation Historic Preservation Office Website Literature Recommendations The Lost Universe by Gene Weltfish Indian Sketches by John Treat Irving An Unspeakable Sadness-The Dispossession of the Nebraska Indians by David Wishart Some Things Are Not Forgotten by Martha Royce Blaine Pawnee Passage by Martha Royce Blaine 1491 by Charles C. Mann 1493 by Charles C. Mann Interpreting Our Heritage by Freeman Tilden Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth Fenn Guest Contact Matt Reed's Twitter: @chauiboy Contact Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast Twitter: @alifeinruinspod Website: www.alifeinruins.com Ruins on APN: https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/ruins Store: https://www.redbubble.com/people/alifeinruins/shop 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 Affiliates Wildnote TeePublic Timeular

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 6, 2021 is: propitiate • proh-PISH-ee-ayt • verb Propitiate means "to gain or regain the favor or goodwill of someone"—in other words, "to make someone pleased or less angry." // Fans of the team wondered how to propitiate the football gods after yet another heartbreaking defeat. See the entry > Examples: "Borlaug was in Mexico for a small side project that involved … a fungus that is wheat's oldest and worst predator (the Romans made sacrifices to propitiate the god of stem rust)." — Charles C. Mann, The Atlantic, 23 Jan. 2018 Did you know? Propitiate tends to suggest averting the anger or malevolence of a superior being. You might "appease" your hunger, but to speak more colorfully, you could "propitiate the gods of hunger." The word is related to propitious, an adjective meaning "likely to have or produce good results" or "being a good omen."

In the beginning there was a bit. And then the pixel: a particular packaging of those bits. With the coming of the pixel, the organizing principle of most all modern media. Nearly every picture in the world is now composed of pixels: cell phone photos and Mars Rover transmissions, book illustrations and video games. Pixels and digital images are now all but synonymous. Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith offered in his new book, A Biography of the Pixel, simple but profound ideas that unify the dazzling varieties of digital image making. Pixel's development begins with Fourier waves, proceeds through Turing machines, and ends with the first digital movies from Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky. Don't know what a Fourier wave is? Don't have a clue what a Turing machine does? Smith makes hard-to-understand concepts accessible to the layperson. Every field has now been touched by the small and mighty pixel – from the arts to technology; from business to entertainment. Smith opens our eyes to show how pictures composed of invisible stuff become visible. Alvy Ray Smith co-founded Pixar and Altamira Software. He was the first Director of Computer Graphics at Lucasfilm and the first Graphics Fellow at Microsoft. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contribution to digital moviemaking technology. Charles C. Mann is a correspondent for The Atlantic, Science, and Wired, has also written for Fortune, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and Vanity Fair, among others. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller 1493. He has also written for the TV network HBO and the series Law & Order. Buy the Book: A Biography of the Pixel (Leonardo) (Paperback) Third Place Books  Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation online click here.

To mark 50 episodes on the podcast, I share my own evolving thoughts on food. I reflect on the state of agriculture and on what sustainability might mean in the food movement today. My experience over the last half decade engaging with the food movement has been that debates are all too often reduced to soundbites on social media. Complex arguments are reduced to 280 characters on Twitter, angry posts on Facebook, and rants on YouTube. We're talking past each other. That's unhelpful.  By sharing my thoughts, I hope to encourage more honest, open and nuanced discussions with whoever is listening.  In this episode, I briefly discuss: The failed promises of industrial agriculture The winners and losers of our food system Food sustainability through different lenses Agriculture and humanity's relationship to nature The future of farming through Charles C. Mann's Prophets and Wizards The land sharing land sparing debate Funding: where does all the money flow? Agroecology and its critics The dilemmas of cell-based and plant-based meat   References (in chronological order): World Health Organisation (WHO) - Obesity and Overweight Fact Sheet Lappé, Francis M., Fowler, Carey and Collins, Joseph (1977) Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity White, Allen (2016) - 'Solving the 10,000-Year-Old Problem of Agriculture: An Interview with Wes Jackson' In These Times Online  Jackson, Wes & Berry, Wendell (2011) Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson Ritchie, Hannah (2021) 'Cutting down forests: what are the drivers of deforestation?' Our World In Data  United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) (2021) 'Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss' Mann, Charles C. (2018) The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Knopf publishing. Barretto, Alberto & Berndes, Göran & Sparovek, Gerd & Wirsenius, Stefan. (2013). Agricultural intensification in Brazil and its effects on land-use patterns: An analysis of the 1975–2006 period. Global change biology. 19(6). 10.1111/gcb.12174.  Holt-Giménez, Eric & Shattuck, Annie & Altieri, Miguel & Herren, Hans & Gliessman, Steve. (2012) We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger. Journal of Sustainable Agriculture 36. 595-598. Biovision Foundation for Ecological Development & IPES-Food (2020) Money Flows: What is holding back investment in agroecological research for Africa? Biovision Foundation for Ecological Development & International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems De Schutter, Olivier & Vermeylen, Margot (2020) The share of agroecology in Belgian official development assistance: an opportunity missed  Meier, M. S. et al. (2015) Environmental impacts of organic and conventional agricultural products – are differences captured by life cycle assessment?  Journal of Environmental Management 149, 193–207  Van der Werf, H.M.G., Knudsen, M.T. & Cederberg, C. (2020) Towards better representation of organic agriculture in life cycle assessment. Nature Sustainability 3, 419–425  Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology (2015) Nyéléni, Mali. Via Campesina website IPES-Food (2016) From uniformity to diversity: a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversifed agroecological systems. International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food systems.  Levidow, Les (2016) Agroecological Innovation. International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM).  Cook, C.D., Hamerschlag, K., and Klein, K. (2016) Farming for the Future: Organic and Agroecological Solutions to Feed the World. Friends of the Earth. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2009) 1.02 billion hungry. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2009) The state of food insecurity in the world. Rome, Italy: Economic and Social DevelopmentDepartment Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Reganold, J., Wachter, J. (2016) Organic agriculture in the twenty-first century. Nature Plants 2, 15221  Rodale Institute (2020) The Truth about Organic. Kutztown, PA.  Galloway McLean, Kirsty & Castillo, Ameyali & Rubis, Jennifer. (2011). Indigenous Peoples, Marginalized Populations and Climate Change: Vulnerability, Adaptation and Traditional Knowledge Debal Deb (2009) “Valuing folk crop varieties for agroecology and food security”, Independent Science News (26 October 2009).  United Nations (2015) United Nations General Assembly, Right to Food, UN Doc. A/70/287 Philpott, Stacy & Lin, Brenda & Jha, Shalene & Brines, Shannon. (2008). A multi-scale assessment of hurricane impacts based on land-use and topographic features. Agric Ecosyst Environ. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. 128. 12-20.  Rosset, Peter & Sosa, Braulio & Jaime, Adilén & Avila, Rocio. (2011). The Campesino-to-Campesino Agroecology Movement of ANAP in Cuba: Social Process Methodology in the Construction of Sustainable Peasant Agriculture and Food Sovereignty. The Journal of peasant studies. 38. 161-91. Poux, X., Aubert, P.-M. (2018). An agroecological Europe in 2050: multifunctional agriculture for healthy eating. Findings from the Ten Years For Agroecology (TYFA) modelling exercise, Iddri-AScA, Study N°09/18, Paris, France  Fairlie, Simon (2010) Meat: A Benign Extravagance. Permanent Publications, Hampshire, UK.  Carrington, Damian (2019) '$1m a minute: the farming subsidies destroying the world - report' The Guardian.  The Food and Land Use Coalition (2019) Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use. The Global Consultation Report of the Food and Land Use Coalition. You might also like: FFS 000 - Why A Food Podcast? FFS 041 - On the Frontlines of Food FFS 033 - A Case for Eating Meat

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:2:23 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 133: Ziya Tong on Realities We Don't See for an overview and discussion of ideas Tong presents in her 2019 book The Reality Bubble4:36 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 04 - Too Cultured from October 20206:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 01 - Why It's Pointless to Start a Podcast In a Pandemic from September 20207:52 - Factfulness by Hans Rosling8:00 - Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker9:39 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March 20219:56 - Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway10:35 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 202116:40 - See “Chickens have gotten ridiculously large since the 1950's” (Vox, 2014)18:50 - See the Wikipedia entry on the “environmental impact of meat production” and “Meat's Sustainability Problem” (The Good Food Institute, 2018)19:48 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett - “An organization called Seeds of Peace tries to change predictions by bringing together young people from cultures that are in serious conflict, like Palestinians and Israelis, and Indians and Pakistanis. The teens participate in activities like soccer, canoeing, and leadership training, and they can talk about the animosity between their cultures in a supportive environment. By creating new experiences, these teens are changing their future predictions in the hopes of building bridges between the cultures and, ultimately, creating a more peaceful world.”26:06 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 15 - The Mind of Gatsby: A Look Through the Cognitive Lens from June 202130:22 - The 2008 documentary Food, Inc. is an “unflattering look inside America's corporate controlled food industry.”30:27 - For more on Chinese surveillance see the “Mass surveillance in China” Wikipedia entry, “Facial Recognition And Beyond: Journalist Ventures Inside China's 'Surveillance State'” (NPR, 2021), “China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone” (The Atlantic, 2018), and “The Panopticon Is Already Here” (The Atlantic, 2020)30:30 - The 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma “[e]xplores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.”31:33 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 08 - System 2, Superman, & Simulacra: Jeff's Amateur Philosophy from December 202031:03 - See “Can Prairie Dogs Talk?” (New York Times Magazine, 2017) and “The Linguistic Genius of Prairie Dogs” (Animal Cognition) which discuss the work of animal biologist Con Slobodchikoff, who among other things claims that many animals have language and can talk33:08 - See the “Pain in animals” Wikipedia entry and “Animals can feel pain. A biologist explains how we know.” (Vox, 2017)35:22 - The Origins of Creativity by E.O. Wilson40:17 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich40:42 - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harrari 42:15 - See The Secret of Our Success website43:09 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 202148:44 - 1491 by Charles C. Mann51:44 - Slight correction - the evolution of fish began about 530 million years ago, see the “Evolution of fish” Wikipedia entry for more54:20 - Watch a hilarious compilation from legendary comedian Mitch Hedberg and see “21 of the Funniest and Most Unforgettable Mitch Hedberg Jokes” (Vulture, 2020)1:02:30 - Candide by Voltaire1:03:15 - James Stockdale was a candidate for Vice President of the United States in the 1992 presidential election, on Ross Perot's independent ticket.1:03:35 - Jim Collins discusses what he calls The Stockdale Paradox, which is based on the experience of James Stockdale who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War for over seven years, in his 2001 business classic Good to Great1:03:58 - In his 2018 book Stubborn Attachments  economist Tyler Cowen argues that “if we want to flourish, do what's best for the maximum amount of people and create a more pluralistic society. One of the most important building blocks of such a society is to have a stubborn attachment to economic growth (in its Cowen variety of Wealth Plus).Cowen defines Wealth Plus as “the total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.”” See “The Clear and Comprehensive Case for Growth” (Archbridge Notes, 2018)This episode was recorded in July 2021The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti 

Our third son Solomon is only 11 years old, but already has demonstrated a remarkable artistic talent. If it were up to him, I think he would work on art all day for the rest of his days. The trouble comes where he still has math to finish up from last year. As he tells us often, "I just get so distracted. I can't focus." Though we try to be patient and work with him in this, I tell Solomon that he has to learn to focus. He has to learn to control and discipline himself to do what he needs to do even when he would rather be doing something else. In short, Solomon needs to learn what all of us must learn - to want to do what we must do. Of course, that does not mean Solomon needs to grow up to be a mathematician. And we do not want him to abandon art. But this country and Western civilization needs more artists who believe in math, conveying through their mediums the fact and truth that reality must be transcendent and knowable by virtue of God having created us in his image, and by virtue of God giving us the Scriptures to know as much as we do about his character, deeds, promises, and plans. But so much art in the past century has been a war on objective truth. To post-modern philosophy and its attendant artistic expression, truth is subjective. The only truth we can truly know and tell is what we feel. No wonder American society is in the mess it is. For more on the history of art and philosophy, read Francis Schaeffer's 'Escape From Reason.' And for more on the need for transcendent, knowable truth pervading the visual cues which society has come to depend on for people to get and develop their ideas and lives, read Charles C. Mann's 'The Wizard and The Prophet,' as well as Edward Bernays' 'Propaganda.' Two plus two equals four and will always equal four. And we need more artists who are able to convey that in all the possible ways to a people who have lost the ability to be reasonable. --- 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

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

Debates about reversing climate change can be understood as a tension between two groups: wizards and prophets.  According to Charles C. Mann, wizards are tech-optimists, those who believe that technology resolves more problems than it creates, that technology will save us from the climate crisis. It has advanced us this far, and it will continue to do so. Think of the innovations in alternative energy, such as wind or solar power.   On the other hand, prophets are more focused on how culture shapes our choices. They believe we need to live more within our means, exercise more humility about what we're able to control or even manage. For prophets, we face this climate crisis because of human hubris and the reality that we are taking more from the earth than it can give.   This is certainly a clarifying model for understanding the discourse around our perhaps most ubiquitous challenge in the twenty-first century. But what if there's a more productive middle way between these two perspectives?   Jeffrey Howard talks with Ross Kenyon, a cofounder of the Nori carbon removal marketplace where he serves as Creative Editor. He has had a varied career, working in an academic center and taking PhD coursework in political philosophy before switching to screenwriting and producing content. He currently leads Nori's creative media efforts, hosting their Reversing Climate Change podcast and producing the Carbon Removal Newsroom podcast.   Kenyon exemplifies a curiosity-driven approach to reversing climate change. He minimizes polemics or alarmist rhetoric, hoping that doing so will bring more voices to the climate crisis table. While he freely admits his communication style doesn't work for everyone, he believes we need this pluralistic vision to reversing climate change if we're going to have much success in reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.   A few questions to ponder. What role does literature or climate fiction have in convincing us of the urgency around the climate crisis? How bad are things now, and what will our failure to reverse climate change mean for geopolitical issues such as war, immigration, starvation, and drought? How do we get people with conflicting ideologies to work together toward shared problems, and what should we personally be doing to help reverse climate change?   Show Notes S2E48 - Reversing Climate Change Podcast - On Pragmatism and Climate Change w/ Jeffrey Howard (2021)   S1E107 - Reversing Climate Change Podcast - A Dedicated Introduction to Communitarianism w/ Jeffrey Howard (2019)   "Going Home with Wendell Berry" by Amanda Petrusich (2019)   Essays, 1993-2017 by Wendell Berry (2019)   Mary Oliver   Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver (2019)   The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann (2019)   Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)   The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)   On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)   All Hell Breaking Loose by Michael T. Klare (2019)   "Treating Carbon Emissions Like Trash Collection Could Reverse Climate Change" by Paul Gambill (2018)   Ep. 16 Where Do Animals Fit Into Human Flourishing w/ Ike Sharpless (2021)   Ep. 11 A Small Farm Future w/ Chris Smaje (2021)   Ep. 9 Trust in a Polarized Age w/ Kevin Vallier (2021)   Ep. 8 Subsistence Agriculture During the Collapse of Industrial Capitalism w/ Ashley Colby (2021)

This week Adam welcomes an author whose book blew his mind more than perhaps any other. Americans are typically taught that prior to the arrival of European settlers, indigenous communities were sparsely populated, lacked technology, and did little to shape the natural landscape. But as this week’s guest Charles C. Mann’s 1491 tells Adam, the most recent research reveals that the American indigenous civilizations were sophisticated, dynamic, and massively populated. Purchase his books 1491 and 1493 at http://factuallypod.com/books. 

Two new studies used data from Cassini’s Grand Finale observations of Saturn and found that the magnetic fields and a wave in the rings provide insight into the core structure and composition of the gas giant. Plus, cosmic rays, how Mayans shaped the Earth, and a review of books by Charles C. Mann.

Weekly JourneywithJesus.net postings. Essay by Debie Thomas: *That You May Come to Believe* for Sunday, 11 April 2021; book review by Dan Clendenin: *1493: Uncovering the New World That Columbus Created* by Charles C. Mann (2011); film review by Dan Clendenin: *Pink Floyd: The Making of 'Dark Side of the Moon'* (2003); poem selected by Debie Thomas: *A List of Praises* by Anne Porter.

Eski ortağım, eski mühendis, yeni veri uzmanı ama daima sürdürülebilirlik odaklı daima araştırmacı kişi Yasin Toparlar ile keyifli bir sohbet kaydettik. Regülasyonlara değindik, şirketin kapanmasına dair öz eleştiri yaptık, mimarların yüzeysel yeşil anlayışına dokundurduk. Keyifli dinlemeler, yorumlarınızı bekliyorum.Programda bahsedilen konular ve Arkilog'a dokunma/ulaşma yöntemleri ise sırasıyla şu şekilde:****1. Jevons Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox2. Nachhaltigkeit: Surdurulebilirlik kelimesinin Almancasi https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachhaltigkeit / https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/50254/1/535039824.pdf3. Hans Carl von Carlowitz: Alman vergilendirme muhasebesi ve madencilik yoneticisi, ormancilik uzerinden “surdurulebilir verim/hasat” konularini ilk tanimlayan kisi olarak bilinir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Carl_von_Carlowitz4. The Limits to Growth (LTG): Club of Rome tarafindan fonlanmis, 17 kisilik bir arastirma ekibince duzenlenmis 1972 tarihli buyumek ve buyumenin sinirlari uzerine yazilmis rapor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth / https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/ 5. Our Common Future (a.k.a. Brundtland Report): BM tarafindan hazirlanmis, surdurulebilir kalkinmaya dair 1987 tarihli onemli bir rapor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Common_Future / https://unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/ie/se/pp/EnCom15/28Nov/SustDev/HELD_SustDev_UNECE_EnComm15_2006_c.pdf6. Energy Performance Gap: Yapilarin tasarim suresince tahmin edilen enerji tuketim miktarlari ile gercekte gozlenen enerji tuketim miktarlari arasindaki ciddi farklara odaklanan akademik arastirma alani. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building-energy_performance_gap / https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmech.2015.00017/full7. BMS / BES / BAS: Yapilardaki enerji tuketimini ama daha ziyade butun operasyonel ekipmanin yonetimini takip eden, gerekli aksiyonlarin alinmasini saglayan ve otomasyon sureclerini organize eden sistemler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_management_system 8. Bjarke Ingels’in Jair Bolsonaro’yu ziyaret etmesinin ardindan Failed Architecture web-sitesinde yayinlanmis yesil mimarinin (ve mimarlarin) “Greenwashing” potansiyelleri uzerine bir yazi: https://failedarchitecture.com/bjarke-ingels-and-the-art-of-greenwashing/ 9. The Economist dergisinde yer alan, yapilari daha yesil yapmak uzerine atilan adimlarin neden yetersiz olduguna dair yazi: https://www.economist.com/international/2019/01/05/efforts-to-make-buildings-greener-are-not-working10. The Wizard and the Prophet: Two remarkable Scientist and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s World. Charles C. Mann tarafindan yazilmis, Dunya’nin surdurulebilirlik ile olan sinavini iki cok farkli karakter, Normal Borlaug ve William Vogt gozunden kiyaslayan kitap. https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-Tomorrows/dp/0307961699 / https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/books/review/the-wizard-and-the-prophet-charles-mann-william-vogt-norman-borlaug.html Bonus: Önümüzdeki dönemde iyiden iyiye önem kazanacak olan "Circular Buildings” konusuna dair kisa bir yazi: https://www.worldgbc.org/news-media/when-building-circular ****Apple Podcast, Ekşisözlük üzerinden podcast için yorum yapmayı ve Instagram (arkilogpodcast), Twitter (arkilogpodcast), Linkedin gibi mecralardan bölümü paylaşmayı ihmal etmeyin :)Slack Komünitemize katılmak ve görüşlerinizi aktarmak için arkilogcommunity.slack.com adresine ve ARKILOG.com websitesine gitmeniz gerekiyor.Dinlediğiniz (ve okuduğunuz) için teşekkürler!

Welcome to the new episode of Urbcast. Today we will talk about an extremely complex topic which is the food waste that we face in our cities all over the world. To emphasize the importance of the topic: we throw out from 33 to 55% of all the food that we have produced (Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not). At the same time, about 8.9% of the world's population — 690 million people is affected by hunger (worldvision.org). So what is wrong with us? It is not that we do not produce enough to feed our planet. There is a problem with access and distribution, to begin with. How to improve the system? As so many of us live in cities nowadays we need to face this enormous challenge and think about some solutions. What can supermarkets do to decrease the amount of food they throw out due to food/safety regulations? Is dumpster diving or urban harvesting a solution? Or maybe we should all use food saving apps like TooGoodTooGo? Where to start if I want to reduce food waste? I asked all those important questions to my guest: Matt Homewood - a food campaigner and An Urban Harvester based Copenhagen. We also talked about Matt's journey through the US where he started dumpster diving as well as his professional exerience at Nordic Sustaina and working with the Cities100 report, as well as Matt's work at Greenpeace Nordic. We talk about the situation in the sustainable Copenhagen where consumer food waste is a big issue (37% of DK food waste). Supermarkets account for 23% and they cause more upstream at the farm level. So we wonder: how can we prevent food waste in Copenhagen (and other cities)? Book reccommended by Matt is: The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, Charles C. Mann https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-prophet You can follow Matt and his campaign against food waste: at his webiste: https://www.matthomewood.com/ on An Urban Harvester Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anurbanharvester/ his Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-homewood/ #foodwaste #dumpsterdiving #food #hunger #poverty #inequalities #copenhagen #supermarkets #foodscarcity #toogoodtogo

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.

Today's Happy Hour is super short (last call!), but we are discussing the unifying that guano has on Africa, Asia, and Europe - and its role in the agro-industrial complex and early globalization. Check out "1493" by Charles C. Mann, if you are interested in more about today's topic. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Dos Andes, ela partiu para colonizar e alimentar o mundo. Nutriu os pobres. Fortaleceu nações. Não há um país que não a considere sua.Estamos falando, é claro, da batata. Na abertura da segunda temporada do Randômico, cumprimos a promessa feita no episódio piloto e entregamos um episódio dedicado inteiramente ao tubérculo mais ilustre do planeta, e nossa complexa relação com ele ao longo da História.[SIGA NO TWITTER: https://twitter.com/RandomicoPod / https://twitter.com/josuedeOliv] REFERÊNCIAS DESTE EPISÓDIO:A Brief History of That Most Noble Tuber, the Potato, por Rebecca Earle. https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-that-most-noble-tuber-the-potato/Promoting Potatoes in Eighteenth-Century Europe, por Rebecca Earle. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MzQ5w1OIf3fzBsZBkVm1VfuSDprNe7tp/view  How the humble potato changed the world, por Daniel Arguedaz Ortiz. http://bbc.com/travel/story/20200302-the-true-origins-of-the-humble-potato How the potato changed the World, por Charles C. Mann. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/ TRILHA SONORA:“The Diamond Way”, by Siddhartha Corsus. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Siddhartha/mystic-gate-songs-for-the-hidden-peak/the-diamond-way “One Person Listening Now”, by Doctor Turtle. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Doctor_Turtle/5f91e09024ca8/one-person-listening-now “Peru”, by Marco Raaphorst. https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Marco_Raaphorst/Melodiefabriek/Marco_Raaphorst_-_Peru

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

By 2050, an estimated 10 billion people will live on earth. How are we going to provide everybody with basic needs while avoiding the worst impacts of climate change? In a talk packed with wit and wisdom, science journalist Charles C. Mann breaks down the proposed solutions and finds that the answers fall into two camps -- wizards and prophets -- while offering his own take on the best path to survival. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Water legend Ken Wright enlightens us on paleohydrology. Ken's studies of how ancient cultures used water over the last quarter century have shed tremendous light on how those cultures engineered their water infrastructure and planned for their water resources. This is a fascinating episode for anyone who is interested in history and how ancient cultures like the Inka (read Charles C. Mann's 1491 re not spelling it “Inca”), Anasazi, Roman, ancient Thai, and Middle Eastern cultures, interfaced with w

On April 10, 2008, Charles C. Mann delivered the 2008 Stuart G. Christian, Jr., Trustees Lecture. In his recent best-selling book, 1491, a groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Mr. Mann radically altered our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492. In "Tobacco, Mosquito, Slave," Mann gave VHS members a preview of his next book, which will describe the creation of the first truly global network of trade and ideas—from the triangular trade linking Europe, West Africa, and the New World to the first trans-Pacific ties between the New World and East Asia. (Introduction by Charles F. Bryan, Jr.) The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.