Podcasts about Norman Borlaug

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

Matters Microbial #90: Using Soil Microbiomes in Sustainable Agriculture May 8, 2025 Today, Dr. Francisco Dini Andreote, Assistant Professor of Phytobiomes at Penn State, joins the #QualityQuorum to tell us about the microbiome of plants and the soil, and how understanding that relationship can improve agriculture. Host: Mark O. Martin Guest: Francisco Dini Andreote Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Spotify Become a patron of Matters Microbial! Links for this episode An overview of the Type 6 Secretory System of bacteria—almost like a microbial switchblade knife. A wonderful video of the T6SS made by a student in my own microbiology course some time ago. A video introduction to the Rhizobium-legume symbiosis and why you should care about it (by my PhD advisor from long ago, Dr. Sharon Long). A more comprehensive review article on the Rhizobium-legume symbiosis.  The chemical signal of geosmin, and how it might be used by other organisms. Ecological succession in the development of sauerkraut. A must read essay by Carl Zimmer likening the human body to a number of ecological niches. The developing field of agroecology.  A reminder about the “One Health” concept. Mycorrhizae and plant nutrition. Chemical communication within the soil. A fun remembrance of Norman Borlaug, who urged us to “listen” to plants. An overview of the root microbiome. The “superorganism” concept versus the “holobiome” concept.. Striga, a parasite of crop plants. Chemical communication and Striga.  An interesting and relevant publication from Dr. Dini Andreote's research group, describing how the root microbiome could help agriculture.  Dr. Dini Andreote's faculty website. Dr. Dini Andreote's very wonderful research team website. Intro music is by Reber Clark Send your questions and comments to mattersmicrobial@gmail.com

Norman Borlaug est sans doute l'un des héros les plus méconnus du XXe siècle. Cet agronome américain, né en 1914 dans l'Iowa, est considéré comme le père de la « Révolution verte », un mouvement qui a transformé l'agriculture mondiale et permis de lutter efficacement contre la famine dans de nombreux pays en développement. Grâce à ses travaux, on estime qu'il aurait sauvé plus d'un milliard de personnes de la sous-alimentation.Après des études en biologie et phytopathologie, Borlaug entame sa carrière au Mexique dans les années 1940, dans le cadre d'un programme financé par la Fondation Rockefeller. À cette époque, le pays fait face à des rendements agricoles très faibles et à des maladies du blé comme la rouille. C'est dans ce contexte qu'il commence à développer des variétés de blé naines, à haut rendement et résistantes aux maladies, capables de pousser dans des conditions climatiques difficiles.Ces nouvelles variétés s'accompagnent d'un ensemble de techniques agricoles modernisées : irrigation contrôlée, engrais chimiques, pesticides et sélection génétique. Cette combinaison, qui sera plus tard appelée Révolution verte, est ensuite appliquée à d'autres cultures, notamment le riz et le maïs. En quelques années, la production de blé au Mexique double, et le pays devient auto-suffisant en céréales dès 1956.Le succès mexicain attire l'attention d'autres nations. Dans les années 1960, l'Inde et le Pakistan, alors menacés par la famine, adoptent les méthodes de Borlaug. En très peu de temps, la production céréalière y explose : l'Inde passe d'importatrice à exportatrice de blé en moins d'une décennie. Ce tournant spectaculaire permet de nourrir des millions de personnes, dans un contexte de croissance démographique galopante.Pour cet accomplissement exceptionnel, Norman Borlaug reçoit en 1970 le prix Nobel de la paix, une distinction rarement accordée à un scientifique. Le comité Nobel souligne que « plus que toute autre personne de son époque, il a contribué à assurer la paix dans le monde en réduisant la faim ».Cependant, la Révolution verte n'est pas exempte de critiques. Certains soulignent l'impact écologique de l'agriculture intensive : épuisement des sols, usage massif de produits chimiques, réduction de la biodiversité. D'autres pointent des inégalités sociales, les petits agriculteurs n'ayant pas toujours les moyens d'accéder à ces technologies.Malgré ces limites, l'œuvre de Borlaug reste monumentale. Jusqu'à sa mort en 2009, il n'a cessé de défendre l'importance de la science pour nourrir l'humanité. Son héritage demeure une source d'inspiration pour les chercheurs du XXIe siècle face aux défis de la sécurité alimentaire mondiale. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

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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In deze tijden van techoligarchie vonden wij van Eten is Weten dat het tijd was om eens te praten over de invloed ervan op de landbouw. En, om met Atoesa te spreken, de sector is er alles behalve immuun voor of tegen. Hidde bespreekt vlak voor de 50ste aflevering (ja, echt) eindelijk een van zijn grote helden, veredelaar en redder van een miljard mensen, Norman Borlaug. Karsten houdt ons op de hoogte van het laatste nieuws rond microplastics, waarvan u een lepel vol in uw brein heeft (ja, echt).

In this episode, Dr. Ilse Alejandra Huerta Arredondo, Assistant Professor of Agriculture at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico, joins host Matt Kasson to discuss growing up in Mexico and her family ties to agriculture including her great grandfather's and grandfather's friendship with Norman Borlaug. Dr. Huerta Arredondo shares her academic journey in Mexico and in central Pennsylvania where she discovered her love for agricultural extension. She discusses her vision for extension and agricultural education in Mexico. Show notes Dr. Huerta Arredondo's North American Agricultural Advisory Network (NAAAN) Profile here: https://naaan.csusystem.edu/directory/ilse-alejandra-huerta-arredondo/ Historic photo of Dr. Huerta Arredondo's great grandfather Jose Huerta and grandfather Jose Huerta Jr. with Norman Borlaug, John Gibler, John Pitner at Centro de Investigaciones Agricolas del Noreste (CIANO), Sonora in 1950: http://hdl.handle.net/10883/4315 Universidad de Guanajuato Press release on Dr. Huerta Arredondo's participation in the Global Guides Program, a development program for educators organized by the World Food Prize Foundation and Global Teach Ag: https://www.ugto.mx/noticias/noticias/17674-profesora-ug-participara-en-programa-internacional-de-educacion-para-la-seguridad-alimentaria This episode is produced by Association Briefings. Special Guest: Ilse Huerta-Arredondo.

Today's podcast is titled, “Future Global Food Production.” Recorded in 1993, this episode features Dr. Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Founder of the International Wheat and Maize Institute, Dr. Matthew McMahon of The World Bank’s Latin American Division, and Dr. Robert Chandler Jr., Founding Director Emeritus of the International Rice Research Institute discussing the future of global food production. Listen now, and don't forget to subscribe to get updates each week for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Seven Philanthropic Wins: The Stories That Inspired Open Phil's Offices, published by Open Philanthropy on July 3, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Since our early days, we've studied the history of philanthropy to understand what great giving looks like. The lessons we learned made us more ambitious and broadened our view of philanthropy's potential. The rooms in our San Francisco office pay tribute to this legacy. Seven of them are named after philanthropic "wins" - remarkable feats made possible by philanthropic funders. In this post, we'll share the story behind each win. Green Revolution During the second half of the twentieth century, the Green Revolution dramatically increased agricultural production in developing countries like Mexico and India. At a time of rapid population growth, this boost in production reduced hunger, helped to avert famine, and stimulated national economies. The Rockefeller Foundation played a key role by supporting early research by Norman Borlaug and others to enhance agricultural productivity. Applications of this research - developed in collaboration with governments, private companies, and the Ford Foundation - sparked the Green Revolution, which is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation. Read more about the Rockefeller Foundation's role in the Green Revolution in Political Geography. The Pill In 1960, the FDA approved "the pill", an oral contraceptive that revolutionized women's reproductive health by providing a user-controlled family planning option. This groundbreaking development was largely funded by Katharine McCormick, a women's rights advocate and one of MIT's first female graduates. In the early 1950s, McCormick collaborated with Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, to finance critical early-stage research that led to the creation of the pill. Today, the birth control pill stands as one of the most common and convenient methods of contraception, empowering generations of women to decide when to start a family. For a comprehensive history of the pill, try Jonathan Eig's The Birth of the Pill. Sesame Street In 1967, the Carnegie Corporation funded a feasibility study on educational TV programming for children, which led to the creation of the Children's Television Workshop and Sesame Street. Sesame Street became one of the most successful television ventures ever, broadcast in more than 150 countries and the winner of more than 200 Emmy awards. Research monitoring the learning progress of Sesame Street viewers has demonstrated significant advances in early literacy. A deeper look into how philanthropy helped to launch Sesame Street is available here. Nunn-Lugar The Nunn-Lugar Act (1991), also known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, was enacted in response to the collapse of the USSR and the dangers posed by dispersed weapons of mass destruction. US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar led the initiative, focusing on the disarmament and securing of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons from former Soviet states. In the course of this work, thousands of nuclear weapons were deactivated or destroyed. The act's inception and success were largely aided by the strategic philanthropy of the Carnegie Corporation and the MacArthur Foundation, which funded research at Brookings on the "cooperative security" approach to nuclear disarmament and de-escalation. Learn more about the Nunn-Lugar Act and its connection to philanthropy in this paper. Marriage Equality The Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges granted same-sex couples the right to marry, marking the culmination of decades of advocacy and a sizable cultural shift toward acceptance. Philanthropic funders - including the Gill Foundation and Freedom to Marry, an organization initially funded by the Evelyn and Wa...

50 % celosvětových kalorií pokryjí tři plodiny – pšenice, kukuřice a rýže. Tyto plodiny prošly šlechtitelskými a genetickými úpravami zejména v poválečném období, jsou bohaté na sacharidy a jejich úkolem bylo jednou provždy skoncovat s hladomory. To se do jisté míry povedlo a americký šlechtitel a otec Zelené revoluce Norman Borlaug dostal za odolné a výnosné odrůdy Nobelovu cenu míru. Jaká je odvrácená strana průmyslově vyráběných kalorií?

50 % celosvětových kalorií pokryjí tři plodiny – pšenice, kukuřice a rýže. Tyto plodiny prošly šlechtitelskými a genetickými úpravami zejména v poválečném období, jsou bohaté na sacharidy a jejich úkolem bylo jednou provždy skoncovat s hladomory. To se do jisté míry povedlo a americký šlechtitel a otec Zelené revoluce Norman Borlaug dostal za odolné a výnosné odrůdy Nobelovu cenu míru. Jaká je odvrácená strana průmyslově vyráběných kalorií?Všechny díly podcastu Podhoubí můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.

Whoa, just went to the Normal Borlaug Boyhood Home in NE Iowa. If you are planning a trip to the Driftless Region, this should definitely be on your itinerary. I explain what you can expect, how you can plan, offer some tips and explain a little bit about the man, Norman Borlaug, the Elvis of wheat research. He is credited with saving over one billion lives through adoption of his farming methods and strains of wheat that it he developed. Experience what made hom great! Absolutely loved this trip to Normal Borlaug Boyhood Home!!

About 20 years ago, Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin wanted to prevent hunger and protect the world's food supply. The two men imagined a so-called “doomsday vault” for plant seeds. (A vault is a secure storage structure.) 大约 20 年前，卡里·福勒 (Cary Fowler) 和杰弗里·霍廷 (Geoffrey Hawtin) 希望防止饥饿并保护世界粮食供应。 两人想象了一个所谓的“末日金库”来存放植物种子。 （保险库是一种安全的存储结构。） Fowler and Hawtin's goal was to keep a supply of seeds safe if existing seed banks were threatened by war, climate change, or other crises. They decided to build their storage building into the side of a mountain north of the Arctic Circle. 福勒和霍廷的目标是在现有种子库受到战争、气候变化或其他危机威胁时确保种子供应安全。 他们决定将仓库建在北极圈以北的一座山的一侧。 “To a lot of people today, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” Fowler said from Saudi Arabia in an interview with the Associated Press. Seeds, he added, are a valuable natural resource that needs protection. “对于今天的很多人来说，这听起来是一件完全合理的事情，”福勒在沙特阿拉伯接受美联社采访时说。 他补充说，种子是一种宝贵的自然资源，需要保护。 But Fowler said: “Fifteen years ago, shipping a lot of seeds to the closest place to the North Pole that you can fly into (and) putting them inside a mountain…” did not sound reasonable. In his words, it was “…the craziest idea anybody ever had.” 但福勒说：“十五年前，将大量种子运送到距离北极最近的地方，你可以飞到（并）将它们放入山中……”听起来不太合理。 用他的话说，这是“……任何人曾经有过的最疯狂的想法。”Their idea became the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. The vault opened in 2008 and now holds 1.25 million seed samples from nearly every country in the world. The structure was built into the side of a mountain. It protects the seeds of over 6,000 kinds of agriculturally important plants. The Crop Trust website says: “Its purpose is to backup genebank collections to secure the foundation of our future food supply.” 他们的想法变成了位于挪威斯瓦尔巴群岛的斯瓦尔巴全球种子库。 该金库于 2008 年开放，目前保存着来自世界上几乎每个国家的 125 万份种子样本。 该结构建在山的一侧。 它保护 6,000 多种重要农业植物的种子。 农作物信托网站称：“其目的是备份基因库收藏，以确保我们未来粮食供应的基础。” Last week, Fowler and Hawtin were named the 2024 World Food Prize winners for their work. Fowler is now the U.S. special diplomat for global food security. Hawtin is an agricultural scientist from Britain. 上周，福勒和霍廷因其工作而被评为 2024 年世界粮食奖获得者。 福勒现任美国全球粮食安全特别外交官。 霍廷是一位来自英国的农业科学家。 They were named the winners of the yearly prize at the U.S. Department of State in Washington. Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised the men at the announcement for their “critical role in preserving crop diversity.” 他们被华盛顿美国国务院评为年度奖获得者。 国务卿安东尼·布林肯在宣布时赞扬了这些人“在保护作物多样性方面发挥的关键作用”。For many years, countries have created seed banks to store seeds for future use. But Fowler said he was concerned that climate change would cause disorder in agriculture. This would make the seed supply even more important. 多年来，各国建立了种子库来储存种子以供将来使用。 但福勒表示，他担心气候变化会导致农业混乱。 这将使种子供应变得更加重要。 Hawtin is an executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an international nonprofit group. He said there were a lot of threats to crops in the past, such as insects, disease, land degradation, and political unrest. He said that climate change has made these problems worse. So, he and Fowler saw a need for additional secure seed storage. 霍廷是国际非营利组织全球作物多样性信托基金的执行董事会成员。 他说，过去农作物面临很多威胁，例如昆虫、疾病、土地退化和政治动荡。 他说，气候变化使这些问题变得更加严重。 因此，他和福勒认为需要额外安全的种子存储。 Hawtin explained that climate change is changing pests and diseases. He added, “Climate change is putting a whole lot of extra problems on what has always been significant ones.” 霍廷解释说，气候变化正在改变害虫和疾病。 他补充道，“气候变化给原本重大的问题带来了很多额外的问题。” Fowler and Hawtin said they hope winning the World Food Prize will help them raise more money for seed banks around the world. Operating them is not too costly. However, the financial support needs to continue forever. 福勒和霍廷表示，他们希望赢得世界粮食奖将帮助他们为世界各地的种子库筹集更多资金。 运营它们的成本并不太高。 然而，财政支持需要永远持续下去。 “This is really a chance to get that message out and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy -- our insurance policy that we're going to be able to feed the world in 50 years,” Hawtin said. 霍廷说：“这确实是一个传达信息的机会，你看，这笔相对较少的钱就是我们的保险单——我们的保险单是我们将能够在 50 年内养活全世界。” 。 Norman Borlaug established the World Food Prize. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his part in what is called the “Green Revolution.” That was a big effort to make crops more productive so the world's growing population would not go hungry. 诺曼·博洛格设立了世界粮食奖。 1970 年，他因在“绿色革命”中的贡献而获得诺贝尔和平奖。 这是为了提高农作物的产量而做出的巨大努力，这样世界上不断增长的人口就不会挨饿。 This fall, Fowler and Hawtin will accept the prize in Des Moines, Iowa, the city where the food prize foundation is based. They will also split the $500,000 award. This year's prize will be presented at the yearly Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue. The conference will be held in Des Moines from October 29 to the 31. 今年秋天，福勒和霍廷将在食品奖基金会所在地爱荷华州得梅因市领奖。 他们还将瓜分 50 万美元的奖金。 今年的奖项将在一年一度的诺曼·博洛格国际对话中颁发。 会议将于10月29日至31日在得梅因举行。

We love to say it's not about the bread on this show, but for this week's Saint it absolutely was about the bread. A gentlemen who has probably impacted your life despite you not knowing he existed. Our Sinner you've almost certainly heard of, and not for anything good. 

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were finally reunited to talk through the week's big natsec stories, including:“First is the Worst.” The historic first criminal trial of a former president has commenced in New York state courts. Both sides have sketched out their cases in opening arguments. What will the charges being brought against former President Trump relating to alleged hush money payments on his behalf mean for him and his 2024 presidential campaign?“Fair Whither Friend.” After months of delay that have, by some accounts, pushed Ukraine dangerously close to defeat, the House has finally passed legislation that would provide them with essential foreign assistance, alongside other aid packages for Israel and Taiwan as well as a handful of related foreign affairs measures. What is good, bad, and ugly about the package that finally got through? And what do the dynamics of its passage mean for other U.S. foreign policy interests in the near term?“The Clock is Tocking.” Among the side measures passed by the House and likely to be enacted into law is a bill targeting the popular social media platform TikTok — one that would ban that platform if its owners, ByteDance, do not divest due to concerns with the degree of control the Chinese government may have over it. But is this sort of regulation of a social media platform constitutional? And is banning one good policy?For object lessons, Alan finally put down the damn remote and recommended an actual book, Charles Mann's “The Wizard and the Prophet,” about the competing, prescient visions of the future put forward by early 20th-century scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Quinta picked it up and urged listeners to check out the new documentary “Stormy,” about Stormy Daniels and the impact her alleged involvement with former President Trump and its aftermath has had on her life. And Scott shouted out one of his favorite purveyors of the silver screen, Alamo Drafthouse, and their thoughtful “sensory friendly” showings that turn up the lights and down the noise for those with young children or sensory sensitivities — something that recently allowed him and his wife to see “Dune 2” in the theater with a newborn in tow.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Alan, Quinta, and Scott were finally reunited to talk through the week's big natsec stories, including:“First is the Worst.” The historic first criminal trial of a former president has commenced in New York state courts. Both sides have sketched out their cases in opening arguments. What will the charges being brought against former President Trump relating to alleged hush money payments on his behalf mean for him and his 2024 presidential campaign?“Fair Whither Friend.” After months of delay that have, by some accounts, pushed Ukraine dangerously close to defeat, the House has finally passed legislation that would provide them with essential foreign assistance, alongside other aid packages for Israel and Taiwan as well as a handful of related foreign affairs measures. What is good, bad, and ugly about the package that finally got through? And what do the dynamics of its passage mean for other U.S. foreign policy interests in the near term?“The Clock is Tocking.” Among the side measures passed by the House and likely to be enacted into law is a bill targeting the popular social media platform TikTok — one that would ban that platform if its owners, ByteDance, do not divest due to concerns with the degree of control the Chinese government may have over it. But is this sort of regulation of a social media platform constitutional? And is banning one good policy?For object lessons, Alan finally put down the damn remote and recommended an actual book, Charles Mann's “The Wizard and the Prophet,” about the competing, prescient visions of the future put forward by early 20th-century scientists William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Quinta picked it up and urged listeners to check out the new documentary “Stormy,” about Stormy Daniels and the impact her alleged involvement with former President Trump and its aftermath has had on her life. And Scott shouted out one of his favorite purveyors of the silver screen, Alamo Drafthouse, and their thoughtful “sensory friendly” showings that turn up the lights and down the noise for those with young children or sensory sensitivities — something that recently allowed him and his wife to see “Dune 2” in the theater with a newborn in tow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode with award-winning author and journalist Alan Weisman, we discuss his 2013 book Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? capturing his journey to over 20 countries over five continents to ask what experts agreed were probably the most important questions on Earth, and also the hardest. ‘How many humans can the planet hold without capsizing?' This wide-ranging and immensely stimulating interview captures how growth-biased cultures, religions, nationalities, tribes, and political systems are collectively undermining our ability to live within planetary limits, and also offers inspiring examples of people finding ways of better balancing our needs with those of the planet's and humanity's future - examples which could provide ways of imagining how we might better get through this bottleneck century. We discuss the intended and unintended consequences of the Green Revolution which pushed us grossly beyond Earth's carrying capacity, while causing irreparable harm to natural ecosystems. Weisman unpacks the ethnic, religious, and political complexities and history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and how pronatalism and ecological overshoot factor into it. We also chat about some of the most successful family planning programs across the world, such as in Iran, Thailand, and Costa Rica, as well as outliers with the worst programs, including in China and India. The controversial role of the Catholic Church in pushing for large families not just across the West, but also in Africa, as well as in shunning the population conversation in environmental conferences, is also highlighted. See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.populationbalance.org/podcast/alan-weisman   ABOUT US The Overpopulation Podcast features enlightening conversations between Population Balance executive director Nandita Bajaj, researcher Alan Ware, and expert guests. We cover a broad variety of topics that explore the impacts of our expanding human footprint on human rights, animal protection, and environmental restoration, as well as individual and collective solutions. Learn more here: https://www.populationbalance.org/ 

In this episode, Dr. Mannon Gallegly, centenarian and Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology at West Virginia University, joins host Matt Kasson for an engaging conversation about Mannon's storied 80+ year career as a plant pathologist. Dr. Gallegly shares stories of working alongside Wood Food Prize recipient John S. Niederhauser and Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. Show notes West Virginia University Faculty Profile here: https://www.davis.wvu.edu/faculty-staff/directory/mannon-gallegly News Release of Mannon's Majesty, a Late Blight and Septoria Leaf Blight resistant Tomato Variety: https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2024/01/24/wvu-professor-emeritus-and-creator-of-the-people-s-tomato-unveils-final-variety-makes-limited-seeds-available-for-growers Donate to the Mannon E. Gallegly Student Travel Fund: https://www.apsnet.org/members/give-awards/donate/giving/funds/Pages/Gallegly.aspx Phytopathology News article on Mannon's fund: https://www.apsnet.org/members/community/phytopathology-news/2024/march/Pages/Mannon-Gallegly.aspx APS link to the 1948 APS North Central Meeting at the University of Minnesota and the 1965 Potato Association of America Meeting in Mexico City: https://www.apsnet.org/members/give-awards/donate/giving/funds/Pages/Gallegly.aspx This episode is produced by Association Briefings (https://associationbriefings.com). Special Guest: Mannon Gallegly.

 Henry Wallace was an Iowan, an accomplished geneticist who hybridized corn; an entrepreneur who co-founded Pioneer Hi-Bred to produce seed, still an agricultural behemoth; the third-generation of editors of an influential American newspaper; a mystic who had a mysterious guru; and a “liberal philosopher”, according to no less an authority than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  He was also at various times Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Vice President of the United States, and a third-party candidate for President of the United States in the 1948 election. Like America, Henry Wallace contained multitudes.  With me today is Benn Steil, author of The World That Wasn't: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. Benn Steil is a Senior Fellow and Director of International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations. His previous books have been on the Marshall Plan, and on the financial arguments focused upon the Bretton Woods conference. In this book we have yet another study examining the central moment of the twentieth century–both chronologically as well as in many other ways–but from the extraordinary and idiosyncratic point of view of Henry Wallace.   For Further Investigation For more on Wallace's Midwestern ethos, see my conversations with Jon Lauck about the Midwest: here, way back in Episode 13 (!!!), and again in Episode 299: The Good Country Benn Steill's previous books are The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War, and The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order Henry Cantwell Wallace (1866-1924): Secretary of Agriculture, father of Henry Cantwell Wallace  "A Magazine Called Wallace's Farmer" The connection between George Washington Carver, Henry Wallace, and Norman Borlaug

Heute: Ohne Dünger geht es nicht Ein Lobgesang auf Norman Borlaug und die Fortschritte in der Landwirtschaft Nein, Brot, Milch und Wurst kommen nicht aus dem Supermarkt. Dahinter steckt harte Arbeit auf dem Acker, Innovation bei der Entwicklung neuer Landmaschinentechnologie und viel Geduld bei der Züchtung von Saatgut. Nein, ohne Dünger geht es auch nicht, denn Weizen, Roggen und Gerste müssen ordentlich ernährt werden, sonst wachsen sie nur kümmerlich und bringen nicht den notwendigen Ertrag. Wie viel Dünger jede Sorte benötigt, weiss man sehr genau, der Landwirt düngt entsprechend. Ja, Pflanzen müssen auch vor Fraßfeinden geschützt werden. Denn Legion sind jene Heerscharen an Schädlingen, die sich drüber hermachen und zum Beispiel die süßen Säfte aus den Blattbahnen saugen, dabei häufig die Pflanzen mit Viren infizieren. Der Bauer muss auch verhindern, dass andere Pflanzen, auch Unkräuter genannt, der angebauten Nutzpflanze Boden und Sonne streitig machen. Nein, ausschließlich regional geht Ernährung nicht. In vormodernen Zeiten ohne Welthandel wären jetzt im Winter, in dem hierzulande eben nichts wächst, die letzten Reste aus den Speisekammern aufgefuttert, das letzte Sauerkraut ebenso wie die letzte Schweinewurst. Ein Lobgesang auf die wichtigsten Erfindungen und Entwicklungen, die Hunger bekämpfen und Lebensmittel sicherer machen. Webseite: https://www.tichyseinblick.de

The State Department is a large government agency handling matters around the world. One of those issues is food security and what can happen when focus drifts on the issue. Dr. Cary Fowler, a special envoy for global food security for the United States State Department, is a return guest to the Borlaug Dialogue at the World Food Prize and has connection to its founder, Dr. Norman Borlaug.

Norman Borlaug revolutionized wheat and all of food production. That was a moon shot of an idea. Raj Shah is looking for the next one from his role as president of the Rockefeller Foundation. The organization's risk capital can take chances with big thoughts he finds and inspires on his return trip to Iowa.

Today's podcast is titled, “Origins of The International Rice Research Institute.” Dr. Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, and Dr. Robert Chandler, Founding Director Emeritus of the International Rice Research Institute, discuss the origins of the International Rice Research Institute and describe how the impetus for the Institute began with Borlaug's work with wheat in Mexico. Recorded in 1994. Listen now, and don't forget to subscribe to get updates each week for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

The Green Revolution was a program of agricultural technology transfer that helped poor countries around the world increase food production from the 1950s onward. An American agronomist named Norman Borlaug developed and popularized the central innovation of this revolution: the concept of “wide adaptation,” or the idea that plants could be bred to produce a high yield in a variety of environments, rather than in a particular region. Borlaug's work won him the Nobel Prize in 1970, and his agricultural insights are often credited with saving millions of people from hunger. But the legacy of Borlaug and the Green Revolution is not as straightforward as these accolades suggest.  In this episode, we caught up with interdisciplinary scientist and historian Marci Baranski to discuss her new book, The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution. She talks with host Jason Lloyd about how a more nuanced understanding of the Green Revolution and Borlaug's work can improve agricultural and economic development policies today. Resources: Marci Baranski's book, The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution Madhumita Saha's book review, “Left Behind by the Green Revolution” (Issues, Summer 2023) Marci Baranski and Mary Ollenberger's essay, “How to Improve the Social Benefits of Agricultural Research” (Issues, Spring 2020)

In this episode of All Things Policy, Saurabh Todi and Shambhavi Naik discuss the importance of the Green Revolution and Dr. M.S. Swaminathan's role. They discuss how science and policy intersect and the steps needed to usher in the next green revolution. Recommended readings: MS Swaminathan's farsightedness for Punjab: Discouraged free power to tackle groundwater crisis, wanted ‘evergreen revolution' without harming ecology MS Swaminathan's evergreen revolution: Productivity without ecological harm Do check out Takshashila's public policy courses: https://school.takshashila.org.in/courses We are @‌IVMPodcasts on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram. https://twitter.com/IVMPodcasts https://www.instagram.com/ivmpodcasts/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/ivmpodcasts/ You can check out our website at https://shows.ivmpodcasts.com/featured Follow the show across platforms: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, JioSaavn, Gaana, Amazon Music Do share the word with your folks  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 

La revolución industrial En un proceso bastante curioso los alimentos fomentaron la revolución industrial, pero a su vez, esta revolución cambió por completo la forma cómo nos alimentamos. Así comenzamos a producir más, para más personas y con mayores impactos sobre la naturaleza. En este capítulo les contaremos los cambios dentro de la agricultura qué promovieron la revolución industrial, pero también de los cambios industriales que modificaron la forma cómo cultivamos y producimos alimentos, y los impactos que este conllevó sobre la naturaleza. Abordaremos la alimentación de los trabajadores en el mundo,la historia de la papa y el azúcar, la simplificación de las dietas mundiales, la revolución verde, la modificación de paisajes y ecosistemas para la producción agrícola y la creación de la industria de los alimentos. Notas del espisodio Los colaboradores de esta serie WWF Colombia. Allí pueden encontrar más informaciónsobre la conservación de la naturaleza en Colombia y el mundo Gran parte de lo dicho en este capítulo se basa en el texto de la investigadora Rachel Laudan “Gastronomía e Imperio” También les recomendamos el libro del historiador Fabio Zambrano “Alimentos para la Ciudad” Para saber más sobre la historia de la papa está este tremendo artículo de Carlos Azcoytia“La verdadera historia de la patata y la batata” El texto clásico sobre la historia del azúcar (en inglés) es “Sweetness and Power” de Sidney Mintz. Aquí les dejamos la referencia Norman Borlaug y la Revolución Verde: “milagros y condenas”   ¡Síguenos en nuestras Redes Sociales! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DianaUribe.fm/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dianauribefm/?hl=es-la Twitter: https://twitter.com/dianauribefm?lang=es Pagina web: https://www.dianauribe.fm

** Este episódio é uma reprise e foi inicialmente publicado em julho de 2021.A agricultura que nós temos hoje é resultado da Revolução Verde, que aconteceu nos anos 60. Na época, desenvolvimentos tecnológicos como fertilizantes químicos, mecanização do campo e o uso de variedades híbridas de plantas, aumentaram dramaticamente a produtividade de várias culturas agrícolas em países em desenvolvimento. Isso evitou uma grave crise de desabastecimento que estava se desenhando com o aumento populacional. O cientista Norman Borlaug, que ficou conhecido como o pai da Revolução Verde, recebeu o prêmio Nobel da Paz em 1970 por ter ajudado a salvar mais de um bilhão de pessoas da fome. Foi no contexto dessa revolução, que o Brasil expandiu sua fronteira agrícola para o cerrado e tornou-se o grande exportador de commodities agrícolas que é hoje.Mas a revolução verde também trouxe problemas. Com um modelo de produção intensivo em insumos, o campo tornou-se também intensivo em capital, prejudicando pequenos produtores. Pesticidas contaminaram pessoas e ecossistemas. E as monoculturas, apesar de mais eficientes no curto prazo, levam ao esgotamento do solo e aumentam os riscos de doenças no longo prazo.Hoje, temos que não só lidar com esses problemas como precisamos também dar um novo salto de produtividade. Até 2050, a população global vai aumentar em 2 bilhões de pessoas e eventos climáticos extremos, como secas, vão deixar tudo bem mais difícil. Esse é o tamanho do desafio na agricultura. Neste episódio eu conto a história de uma startup brasileira que está trabalhando exatamente nessa fronteira. A Krilltech produz uma nono-molécula orgânica chamada arbolina, que aumenta a produtividade de mais de vinte culturas: 20% na soja, 12% no trigo, 40% no tomate. A nanotecnologia foi descrita no ​Plano Nacional de Fertilizantes do governo federal como "uma alternativa promissora para impulsionar uma nova revolução agrotecnológica brasileira”. O documento citou a Krilltech nominalmente.Nesta entrevista reprise, concedida há pouco mais de um ano, Diego Stone, um dos fundadores da Krilltech, explica como a arbolina funciona. Ele também fala da sua difícil trajetória de bootstrapping - mas com muito bom humor, como você vai notar nessa conversa. Uma atualização: desde que o episódio foi ao ar pela primeira vez, a Krilltech já triplicou sua capacidade de produção e recebeu o aporte de um grupo de investidores do agronegócio.--O EDF é publicado quinzenalmente às quintas. Para não perder nenhum episódio, siga esse podcast no seu tocador e indique para um amigo. Entre em contato por aqui: podcast@economiadofuturo.comSupport the show

I always wondered why monks put fasting so high on the list of things to do, and St. Benedict, who saved civilization from returning to complete debauchery, had specific rules for his monastery about food. It was known that the monk who could not be disciplined on food would fall to pieces on virtue. I can confirm this. Having grown up on Kool-Aid and Little Debbie (and loving every Nutty Buddy minute of it), the era of cheap food has created a constant feast. The elderly people who grew up in the Depression understood food far better than their baby boomer children and grandchildren. They certainly understood it better than those of us who, in our post-Kool-Aid college era, could pound cheap cases of Natty Light beer and wash it down with a Nacho Bell Grande at 4 AM. (Lest anyone feel I lean too far right, let me remind you I live caught somewhere between hippy and redneck, and the hippies and tree-huggers were right about fast food and fertilizer. But, they missed the second part. While pointing a finger at food and greed, they accepted sin and the overall moral decay as “progressive.”) Here's my theory on Genesis as a mirror of the Green Revolution and the Sexual Revolution: No-fault divorce was caused by refrigeration. Nitrogen fertilizer led to mass-scale abortion. The combine harvester led to the current transgender fad. In short: just as food led to The Fall in the Garden, so did the food security of the last seventy years lead to the rejection of God all over again. In Iowa, a man named Norman Borlaug is praised for feeding a billion people with his scientific agricultural management principles, but in producing massive yields and cheap food, we ate from the tree of knowledge once again and made the same mistake. There is a reason that The Fall starts with food. Taking food for granted leads to sin, lots of it. Food and sex are intertwined. Notice, please, if you will, that the story in Genesis 3 of eating is followed by an obvious sexual fall where they know their nakedness. …the serpent said to the woman, “…when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked…” (Gen 3:4-7)Stop. Do you hear how the food was eaten in this secure food paradise? It was eaten without God. Adam and Eve rejected God. Neither of them paused to say “Grace” before eating the fig (or the apple, if you prefer). No, they ate just like we do today, like we do at Culver's or Applebee's, we just dive right in because the food is taken for granted. Occasionally you see some weird family praying in public, but it's rare. And right after Adam and Eve pig out on the fruit, they are naked, porning up the whole world. They are George Costanza. How we think about food matters immensely in the moral life, and it's no wonder that the mass rejection of God parallels the obvious fact that few people pause to say a prayer before eating today. As I fell away, I fell into free beer and fast food and the Age of Costanza swallowed me like the sea beast did Jonah, except I was in the belly for far more than three days. I was barfed out about fifteen years later.Notice, if you would, that the Lord's Prayer hinges in the center on the phrase: “Give us this day our daily bread,” signaling that food is important. In fact, food is so important in centering our lives around God, that the whole Lord's Prayer links this line about food between the beginning heavenly things to the latter earthly things. Food is a gift from God and we should be acknowledging that simple fact as a blessing. But we think the food came from our own ingenuity and cleverness.We assume that the Chipotle and the mutant-sized fruits at Costco all came from us, forgetting that the soil and water itself came from God. This is like someone entering a beautiful home, hanging their own 3x5 picture on a wall, and declaring, “I built this house.” The fact that we have mucked with some genes, figured out refrigeration, and spread NPK fertilizer around the earth in no way diminishes the reality that this created world is the foundation, the gift from God, from which every calorie we eat springs forth. In other words, we are foodless without God. The Great Hunger in 1800s Ireland was not that long ago, and for goodness sakes, Band-Aid and “We are the World” was a mere forty years ago when Ethiopia suffered from famine. The illusion of food security is strong because anyone alive in America today who remembers the Great Depression is now very likely in a nursing home, and those people tend to say a prayer before they eat. A culture flush with food and wealth quickly falls into sin. I don't know how, but the short and seemingly simple book of Genesis always has another layer to it. But then so does Exodus. In the prelude to the Golden Calf, what happens? A giant Texas barbecue, that's what. “…the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.” (Ex 32:6)Food and booze are followed shortly thereafter by the most famous orgy in history, the scandal known as the Golden Calf incident. It makes Watergate or the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal look like a game of Go Fish. Furthermore, in Exodus, whenever the Israelites start complaining, they want to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt where they were slaves, but you can see how strong food is, such that it goes hand in hand with the rejection of God. What they pine for is when they were slaves and “sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full.” Surely there were some hieroglyphic nudes involved as well, the ancient Egyptian version of Playboy or Penthouse. We've all seen the art - they had their porn on stone and papyrus instead of screens. The more I read the Bible, the more I see how much food and sex come up, and why the seemingly odd acts of sacrifice in the Pentateuch make increasing sense, because it was aligning the people's food toward God, and this is exactly what the Eucharist does in our lives at the Catholic Holy Mass. (Once again, two excellent books to help understand sacrifice and food in the Bible are Welcoming Gifts: Sacrifice in the Bible and Christian Life and Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.) Somehow, a kind of knowledge lies within our food, and it goes specifically with taking food for granted. There is something about being full, and having plenty of food, that leads to pride and the rejection of God. I think this is why Jesus says that it will be harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. Why? Because the rich man has plenty of food. He feels fully secure and therefore thinks he can live without God. He assumes he has no weakness because his belly is full and he cannot imagine missing a meal because his bank account is also full. All of this illuminates to me why so many of the saints fasted, and why the beatitudes elevate the poor, and why Jesus calls so many of his sheep from places where food security is unlike the American buffet. Those who appreciate food tend to appreciate God, because they know that God is the giver of food. “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a demand; it's a supplication to God and a request made with gratitude. Even today, wealth means food security, but we have so much food that even those in poverty are overweight, and statistics bear this out. Thus we have reached an odd point, where poverty does not mean hunger in many places. That's great that we have food, except when it leads to the rejection of God. So knowledge of good and evil, and the idea that we can be like God, comes after food abundance. It should come as no surprise that the modern “all-you-can-eat-buffet” started in Vegas in the 1940s in order to keep gamblers at the tables, as food and vice were married in true Vegas style. When we feel full, we assume a strength and power that we don't truly possess, and feeling strong, pride blooms and humility is trampled. Fertilizer brought the modern fruit in the garden but the fruit was Fast Food and cheap food, and we have eaten, and eaten, and eaten, like the Hungry Little Caterpillar. The only problem is, we're not caterpillars, so we don't turn into butterflies, we just become full and look for other things to do, like sinning. Sex is the most obvious one. Without food abundance, there would have been no Woodstock, because there would not have been a large population of idle college students of prime working age who could while away their youthful years on drugs and alcohol. Without food abundance and a sense of security in wealth, the Prodigal Son never leaves home and squanders his money on vice. I speak from experience, despite coming of age long after Woodstock, and millennia after the Prodigal Son. Once we are full, knowledge is the great, tantalizing dessert that we desire, always calling to us. It is like the pie in the old diners that sat in the revolving glass case, spinning around, on display like some kind of jewelry near the cash register. The pie sat behind glass like forbidden fruit, and we only order after being already full. But the appetite continues, wanting the pie. I remember looking at the pie and cake in those well-lit spinning cases and wondering, “What might the pie taste like? Will it fulfill me and finish off my meal? What if I could just have a bite?” I don't recall a serpent being there at all, but if serpent actually means “Shiny one” as I have read, then I know what the sacred writer of Genesis was referring to. St. Benedict knew something important. He knew that we cannot reach the wisdom through the mouth and stomach. The kind of knowledge that will satisfy our souls does not come through food, which is why Jesus tells the devil, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” It's not through pie or Kool-Aid or the constipation that accompanies 200 grams of protein a day that we will find the peace and rest we seek.. In a bizarre twist, we must pursue a different kind of knowing, sometimes called the Cloud of Unknowing, and it comes not through food, but through self-denial and prayer. The cloud of ecstasy, we're told by the culture today, must come by a different kind of relationship, usually sexual or experiential, and we completely forget about food. If we haven't fallen for the marketing of the sugar mafia, particularly Coca Cola, then we may fall for the fitness syndicate's promises. If we are not overeating, we then go to the other side of food insanity, where we must know the caloric content and nutrients of every morsel that passes over our teeth. But in both cases, gross abundance of food is present. The foodies and the gluttons have one thing in common: a food obsession with the abandonment of God. Hence, our current world of sexual immorality is a symptom of a prior fall, just as we really don't see the sexual fall in Genesis until chapter 6, with the infamous Nephilim, which come after the eating in the Garden. But one thing is certain. Wealth and abundance lead to the other sins of the body, the “warm sins” as they are sometimes called. And in my own lifetime, you could watch and observe this mood change about what is and what is not a sin, which almost coincided with the increased portions of food. The organic phenomenon is trying to correct the problem seeing food as the God, when food is in fact the gift from God, and so every crossfit and intermittent faster who is not measuring out their food-prep with God at the forefront has missed the point. Both the obese and the buff miss the purpose. It's no wonder we don't understand Leviticus, because it's almost entirely about food and getting into the right relationship to God via food. But we have moved on, thinking that the food abundance will last forever, and thus we've moved on to ever greater sins, knocking down walls and fences of morality and calling them old-fashioned. Why? Because we think this Garden was of our doing, and not God's. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Slowing down AI progress is an underexplored alignment strategy, published by Norman Borlaug on July 24, 2023 on LessWrong. The emotional burden of watching the world end My current beliefs about AI timelines have made my life significantly worse. I find thoughts about the ever-shrinking timeline to AGI invading nearly every aspect of my life. Every choice now seems to be affected by the trajectory of this horrible technology. Based on the responses in this post and others, many if not most people on this forum have been affected in a similar way. AI is the black hole swallowing all other considerations about the future. Frankly, I feel a good deal of anger about the current state of affairs. All these otherwise thoughtful and nice people are working to build potentially world-ending technology as fast as possible. I'm angry so few people are paying any attention to the danger. I'm angry that invasive thoughts about AGI destroying the world are making it harder for me to focus on work that might have a non-zero chance of saving it. And I'm frustrated we've been so closed-minded in our approach to solving this problem. The current situation is almost exactly analogous to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War 2. There's a bunch of very smart people gathered together, supplied with a fuckton of money by powerful groups, working towards the same destructive goal. There is social proof all around them that they are doing the right thing. There are superficially plausible reasons to think that everything will turn out fine. There is token engagement with the concerns raised by people concerned about the implications of the technology. But at the end of the day, the combination of personal incentives, social proof and outside impetus make everyone turn their head and ignore the danger. On the rare occasion that people are convinced to leave, it's almost always the most conscientious, most cautious people, ensuring the remaining team is even less careful. There is so much magical thinking going on among otherwise intelligent people. Everyone seems to be operating on the assumption that no technology can destroy us, that everything will magically turn out fine, despite the numerous historical examples of new inventions destroying or nearly destroying the world (see the Cuban Missile Crisis or the great oxidation event when oxygen-producing bacteria extincted themselves and most other life on earth and caused a 300 million year ice age). Frankly I've found the response from the EA/rationalist community has been pretty lackluster so far. Every serious solution that has been proposed revolves around solving alignment before we make AGI, yet I know ZERO people who are working on slowing down capabilities progress. Hell, until just a month ago, EA orgs like 80,000 hours were RECOMMENDING people join AI research labs and work on CREATING superintelligence. The justifications I've read for this behavior always seem to be along the lines of "we don't want to alienate the people working at top AI orgs because we feel that will be counter-productive to our goals of convincing them that AI alignment is important." Where has this strategy gotten us? Does the current strategy of getting a couple of members of the EA/Rationalist community onto the safety teams at major AI orgs actually have a chance at working? And is it worth foregoing all efforts to slow down progress towards AGI? The goals of DeepMind, OpenAI, and all the other top research labs are fundamentally opposed to the goal of alignment. The founding goal of Deepmind is to "solve intelligence, then use that to solve everything else." That mission statement has been operationalized as paying a bunch of extremely smart people ridiculous salaries to create and distribute the blueprints for (potentially) world-ending AGI...

From Nobel winners to great innovators, Dan Saladino explores the history of prize-winning food ideas that changed the world, including researchers who uncovered the secrets of our stomachs to the plant breeds transforming the future of wheat. Nominations are now open for this year's BBC Food and Farming Awards until June 19th, including Best Innovation which was created to celebrate ideas that will make food production better for us and for the planet. For more than a century, and around the world, ground-breaking ideas linked to food have featured in awards and prizes, from Ivan Pavlov's research on our digestive system through to Norman Borlaug's efforts to increase food production with crop breeding in the 1960s. Both received a Nobel Prize. In more recent years awards have been created to find solutions to some of the biggest challenges we face in food and farming. The former chef of the Swedish restaurant Faviken, Magnus Nilsson now oversees the Food Planet Prize, the world's biggest environmental prize. He tells Dan about previous winners who have created solutions to plastics in our oceans and the problem of abandoned fishing equipment, so called 'ghost nets' and also a project in Africa providing refrigeration to farmers which is resulting in a dramatic reduction in food waste. Another award winner in the programme is Heidi Kuhn, founder of Roots of Peace. This year she was recognised by the US based World Food Prize for decades of work helping to clear mines from regions impacted by conflict and return the land to food production. Produced and presented by Dan Saladino.

Today's podcast is titled, “Africa's Agriculture Crisis.” Dr. Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Founder of the International Wheat and Maize Institute, Dr. Robert Chandler Jr., Founding Director Emeritus of the International Rice Research Institute, and Dr. Nyle Brady, International Development Consultant for the World Bank and United Nations discuss Africa's agriculture crisis. Listen now, and don't forget to subscribe to get updates each week for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A BOTEC-Model for Comparing Impact Estimations in Community Building, published by Patrick Gruban on March 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We are grateful to Anneke Pogarell, Birte Spekker, Calum Calvert, Catherine Low, Joan Gass, Jona Glade, Jonathan Michel, Kyle Lucchese, Moritz Hanke and Sarah Pomeranz for conversations and feedback that significantly improved this post. Any errors, of fact or judgment, remain our entirely own. Summary When prioritising future programs in EA community building, we currently lack a quantitative way to express underlying assumptions. In this post, we look at different existing approaches and present our first version of a model. We intended it to make Back-of-the-envelope (BOTEC) estimations by looking at an intervention (community building or marketing activity) and thinking about how it might affect participants on their way to having a more impactful life. The model uses an estimation of the average potential of people in a group to have an impact on their lives as well as the likelihood of them achieving it. If you'd like only to have a look at the model, you can skip the first paragraphs and directly go to Our current model. Epistemic Status We spent about 40-60 hours thinking about this, came up with it from scratch as EA community builders and are uncertain of the claims. Motivation As new co-directors of EA Germany, we started working on our strategy last November, collecting the requests for programs from the community and looking at existing programs of other national EA groups. While we were able to include some early on as they seemed broadly useful, we were unsure about others. Comparing programs that differ in target group size and composition as well as the type of intervention meant that we would have to rely on and weigh a set of assumptions. To discuss these assumptions and ideally test some of them out, we were looking for a unified approach in the form of a model with a standardised set of parameters. Impact in Community Building The term community building in effective altruism can cover various activities like mass media communication, education courses, speaker events, multi-day retreats and 1-1 career guiding sessions. The way we understand it is more about the outcome than the process, covering not only activities that focus on a community of people. It could be any action that guides participants in their search for taking a significant action with a high expected impact and to continue their engagement in this search. The impact of the community builder depends on their part in the eventual impact of the community members. A community builder who wants to achieve high impact would thus prioritise interventions by the expected impact contribution per invested time or money. Charity Evaluators like GiveWell can indicate impact per dollars donated in the form of lives saved, disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) reduced or similar numbers. If we guide someone to donate at all, donate more effectively and donate more, we can assume that part of the impact can be attributed to us. For people changing their careers to work on the world's most pressing problems, starting charities, doing research or spreading awareness, it's harder to assess the impact. We assume an uneven impact distribution per person, probably heavy-tailed. Some people have been responsible for saving millions, such as Norman Borlaug or might have averted a global catastrophe like Stanislav Petrov. Existing approaches Marketing Approach: Multi-Touch Attribution In our strategy, we write: Finding the people that could be interested in making a change to effective altruistic actions, guiding them through the process of learning and connecting while keeping them engaged up to the point where they take action and beyond is a multi-step ...

In this episode, we connect with food science and safety specialist Dr. Elsa Murano. Presently, Dr. Murano serves as the Director of the Norman E. Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture and Development at Texas A&M University's Agriculture and Life Sciences program.  For years, Dr. Murano has been lending her expertise to developing countries around the world – from Sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America… Dr. Murano and her team are committed to following the legacy of Dr. Norman Borlaug, which is to elevate smallholder farmers out of poverty using science. Whether it be crop production or water management, the goal is to create opportunities for farmers across social classes. Offer: Are you ready to unlock the true potential of your body and mind? Introducing Analemma coherent water, a revolutionary new way to improve your health and well-being. Analemma has been clinically proven to significantly increase the ATP levels – the mitochondrial energy of your body! It significantly improves your gut health by improving the state of your microbiome, and it provides up to 12 years of biological age rejuvenation within only three months of drinking this water! Imagine having more energy, a healthier gut, a clearer mind and a youthful body – with Analemma water, it all stops being a dream. Take the first step towards unlocking your true potential – try Analemma water and revolutionize your life! Visit coherent-water.com. Every purchase comes with a 100% money back guarantee, so you can literally taste the difference risk free GET 10% DISCOUNT BY USING CODE Genius10.coherent-water.com – Join the Water Revolution. Join us now to learn about: What causes farmers to fall into poverty, and the strategies that are used to help them. Why economic connections to the marketplace can be challenging for family farmers to obtain. How exporters take advantage of farmers in developing countries.  How environmental factors affect agricultural production in poverty-stricken areas. To find out more about Dr. Elsa Murano and her projects, click here now! Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C

In this episode, we connect with food science and safety specialist Dr. Elsa Murano. Presently, Dr. Murano serves as the Director of the Norman E. Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture and Development at Texas A&M University's Agriculture and Life Sciences program.  For years, Dr. Murano has been lending her expertise to developing countries around the world – from Sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America… Dr. Murano and her team are committed to following the legacy of Dr. Norman Borlaug, which is to elevate smallholder farmers out of poverty using science. Whether it be crop production or water management, the goal is to create opportunities for farmers across social classes. Join us now to learn about: What causes farmers to fall into poverty, and the strategies that are used to help them. Why economic connections to the marketplace can be challenging for family farmers to obtain. How exporters take advantage of farmers in developing countries.  How environmental factors affect agricultural production in poverty-stricken areas. To find out more about Dr. Elsa Murano and her projects, click here now! Episode also available on Apple Podcast: http://apple.co/30PvU9C

George Washington Carver was the first Black student at Simpson College and Iowa State, and later the first Black faculty member at Iowa State. He is only the third person to be honored with a statewide day in Iowa — joining Herbert Hoover and agronomist Norman Borlaug

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.

Each year farmers are faced with a unique set of challenges, and 2022 was no exception. In this episode, Preston and Jason recap the 2022 growing season and discuss the future of farming. For added context to the discussion, check out the following episodes: Episode 42: Julie Borlaug - Dr. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution Episode 56: Matt Helm - New Tools in the Battle Against Tar Spot of Corn Episode 64: Megan Dwyer - Managing Fertilizer Costs with Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategies Episode 66: The Latest Tool in the Battle Against Corn Rootworm - SmartStax Pro® Episode 68: Paul Mitchell - The Economics of Farming in a Volatile Market Environment Preston and Jason appreciate feedback from and enjoy interacting with their audience. Follow the Focus on Agriculture Podcast on Twitter: @Focus_on_Ag.

The World Food Prize was established by Dr. Norman Borlaug and is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in agriculture. This year's winner is Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, whose extensive work in crop modeling, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and activism is helping to prepare the world to combat the effects of climate change. In this episode, Cynthia discusses her work as a crop modeler, her work with farmers, politicians, and other stakeholders, and how we can all work together for lasting change. Tune in to learn: Why NASA is interested in crop modeling on Earth How a foray into Italy got Cynthia hooked on agriculture How Ag MIP is creating a crop modeling symphony How a stakeholder-first approach helps farmers and researchers advance together If you would like more information about this topic, this episode's paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1002/csan.20789 It will be freely available from 14 October to 31 October, 2022. Contact us at podcast@sciencesocieties.org or on Twitter @FieldLabEarth if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for show topics, and if you want more content like this don't forget to subscribe. If you'd like to see old episodes or sign up for our newsletter, you can do so here: https://fieldlabearth.libsyn.com/. If you would like to reach out to Cynthia, you can find her here: crr2@columbia.edu If you would like to reach out to Ritika Lamichhane from our Student Spotlight, you can find her here: lami4314@vandals.uidaho.edu Twitter: https://twitter.com/ritikal101 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritika-lamichhane-a20a65a9 Resources Transcripts: https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/skhFFkRn2f3ckFjlhC1MhSXkpLOxIqZeB3dsHNkJNqaiy1PE4-LTxFePyRqfqzgZlb054mfBRpGfOdlDcoEgt82-Fhg?loadFrom=SharedLink  Ag MIP website: https://agmip.org/ Ag MIP Impacts Explorer: https://agmip-ie.wenr.wur.nl/ World Food Prize: https://www.worldfoodprize.org/ World Food Prize feature on Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig: https://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/laureates/2022_rosenzweig/ Dr. Norman Borlaug with Julie Borlaug, Dr. Ronnie Coffman, and Dr. Ed Runge: https://fieldlabearth.libsyn.com/dr-norman-borlaug-with-julie-borlaug-dr-ronnie-coffman-and-dr-ed-runge Field, Lab, Earth is Copyrighted by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America.

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.

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Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse, technological & moral change, problems of academia, who changes history, and much more.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Read the full transcript here.Follow Will on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Timestamps(00:23) - Effective Altruism and Western values(07:47) - The contingency of technology(12:02) - Who changes history?(18:00) - Longtermist institutional reform(25:56) - Are companies longtermist?(28:57) - Living in an era of plasticity(34:52) - How good can the future be?(39:18) - Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most important(45:36) - AI and the centralization of power(51:34) - The problems with academiaPlease share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!TranscriptDwarkesh Patel 0:06Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing William MacAskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.Will MacAskill 0:20Thanks so much for having me on.Effective Altruism and Western valuesDwarkesh Patel 0:23My first question is: What is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?Will MacAskill 0:32Yeah, I think it is contingent. Maybe not on the order of, “this would never have happened,” but at least on the order of decades. Evidence that Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is that similar ideas have been promoted many times during history, and not taken on.We can go back to ancient China, the Mohists defended an impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to help all people. In particular, providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, there were early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Even Peter Singer in the 70s had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor — and didn’t get a lot of traction until early 2010 after GiveWell and Giving What We Can launched.What explains the rise of it? I think it was a good idea waiting to happen. At some point, the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people which wasn’t possible otherwise. There were some particularly lucky events like Alex meeting Holden and me meeting Toby that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.Dwarkesh Patel 1:49If it's true, as you say, in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't that good? They're mediocre, or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with a median of all the values we could have had at this point. Obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.Will MacAskill 2:09Absolutely. Taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, “wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then!” That's a terrifying thought. I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth.One of the lessons I draw in the book is that we should not think we're at the end of moral progress. We should not think, “Oh, we should lock in the Western values we have.” Instead, we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than whichever happened to win out.Dwarkesh Patel 2:56So that makes a lot of sense. But I'm asking a slightly separate question—not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values - we have the sense that we've made moral progress (things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2200)- should we not expect that to be the case? Should our priors be that these are ‘meh’ values?Will MacAskill 3:19Our priors should be that our values are as good as expected on average. Then you can make an assessment like, “Are other values of today going particularly well?” There are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming—which I think is a moral atrocity. Having said that, my view is to think that we're doing better than average.If civilization were just a redraw, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes. The abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy—these are all things that we could have lost and are huge gains.Dwarkesh Patel 4:14If that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection dangerous? If moral progress is a random walk, and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're possibly reversing. Maybe you're risking regression to the mean if you just have 1,000 years of progress.Will MacAskill 4:30Moral progress isn't a random walk in general. There are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. One of them is, “What’s right, morally speaking? What's their best arguments support?” I think it's a weak force, unfortunately.The idea of lumbar flexion is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and goodhearted model inquiry to guide which values we end up with.Are we unwise?Dwarkesh Patel 5:05In the book, you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often. And so, do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way, and suggest that we should be Burkean Longtermists and reject these inside-view esoteric threats?Will MacAskill 5:32My view goes the opposite of the Burkean view. We are cultural creatures in our nature, and are very inclined to agree with what other people think even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms. It works well in a low-change environment. The environment we evolved towards didn't change very much. We were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of years.Now, we're in this period of enormous change, where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year. That's unprecedented. It means that we should be trying to figure things out from first principles.Dwarkesh Patel 6:34But at current margins, do you think that's still the case? If a lot of EA and longtermist thought is first principles, do you think that more history would be better than the marginal first-principles thinker?Will MacAskill 6:47Two things. If it's about an understanding of history, then I'd love EA to have a better historical understanding. The most important subject if you want to do good in the world is philosophy of economics. But we've got that in abundance compared to there being very little historical knowledge in the EA community.Should there be even more first-principles thinking? First-principles thinking paid off pretty well in the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. From January 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or taking it very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't. The existing institutions weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.The contingency of technologyDwarkesh Patel 7:47In your book, you point out several examples of societies that went through hardship. Hiroshima after the bombings, Europe after the Black Death—they seem to have rebounded relatively quickly. Does this make you think that perhaps the role of contingency in history, especially economic history is not that large? And it implies a Solow model of growth? That even if bad things happen, you can rebound and it really didn't matter?Will MacAskill 8:17In economic terms, that's the big difference between economic or technological progress and moral progress. In the long run, economic or technological progress is very non-contingent. The Egyptians had an early version of the steam engine, semaphore was only developed very late yet could have been invented thousands of years in the past.But in the long run, the instrumental benefits of tech progress, and the incentives towards tech progress and economic growth are so strong, that we get there in a wide array of circumstances. Imagine there're thousands of different societies, and none are growing except for one. In the long run, that one becomes the whole economy.Dwarkesh Patel 9:10It seems that particular example you gave of the Egyptians having some ancient form of a steam engine points towards there being more contingency? Perhaps because the steam engine comes up in many societies, but it only gets turned into an industrial revolution in one?Will MacAskill 9:22In that particular case, there's a big debate about whether quality of metalwork made it actually possible to build a proper steam engine at that time. I mentioned those to share some amazing examples of contingency prior to the Industrial Revolution.It's still contingency on the order of centuries to thousands of years. Post industrial-revolution world, there's much less contingency. It's much harder to see technologies that wouldn't have happened within decades if they hadn't been developed when they were.Dwarkesh Patel 9:57The model here is, “These general-purpose changes in the state of technology are contingent, and it'd be very important to try to engineer one of those. But other than that, it's going to get done by some guy creating a start-up anyways?”Will MacAskill 10:11Even in the case of the steam engine that seemed contingent, it gets developed in the long run. If the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in Britain in the 18th century, would it have happened at some point? Would similar technologies that were vital to the industrial revolution developed? Yes, there are very strong incentives for doing so.If there’s a culture that's into making textiles in an automated way as opposed to England in the 18th century, then that economy will take over the world. There's a structural reason why economic growth is much less contingent than moral progress.Dwarkesh Patel 11:06When people think of somebody like Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. It's like, “If you could have done something that, you'd be the greatest person in the 20th century.” Obviously, he's still a very good man, but would that not be our view? Do you think the green revolution would have happened anyways?Will MacAskill 11:22Yes. Norman Borlaug is sometimes credited with saving a billion lives. He was huge. He was a good force for the world. Had Norman Borlaug not existed, I don’t think a billion people would have died. Rather, similar developments would have happened shortly afterwards.Perhaps he saved tens of millions of lives—and that's a lot of lives for a person to save. But, it's not as many as simply saying, “Oh, this tech was used by a billion people who would have otherwise been at risk of starvation.” In fact, not long afterwards, there were similar kinds of agricultural development.Who changes history?Dwarkesh Patel 12:02What kind of profession or career choice tends to lead to the highest counterfactual impact? Is it moral philosophers?Will MacAskill 12:12Not quite moral philosophers, although there are some examples. Sticking on science technology, if you look at Einstein, theory of special relativity would have been developed shortly afterwards. However, theory of general relativity was plausibly decades in advance. Sometimes, you get surprising leaps. But, we're still only talking about decades rather than millennia. Moral philosophers could make long-term difference. Marx and Engels made an enormous, long-run difference. Religious leaders like Mohammed, Jesus, and Confucius made enormous and contingent, long-run difference. Moral activists as well.Dwarkesh Patel 13:04If you think that the changeover in the landscape of ideas is very quick today, would you still think that somebody like Marx will be considered very influential in the long future? Communism lasted less than a century, right?Will MacAskill 13:20As things turned out, Marx will not be influential over the long term future. But that could have gone another way. It's not such a wildly different history. Rather than liberalism emerging dominant in the 20th century, it was communism. The better technology gets, the better the ruling ideology is to cement its ideology and persist for a long time. You can get a set of knock-on effects where communism wins the war of ideas in the 20th century.Let’s say a world-government is based around those ideas, then, via anti-aging technology, genetic-enhancement technology, cloning, or artificial intelligence, it's able to build a society that possesses forever in accordance with that ideology.Dwarkesh Patel 14:20The death of dictators is especially interesting when you're thinking about contingency because there are huge changes in the regime. It makes me think the actual individual there was very important and who they happened to be was contingent and persistent in some interesting ways.Will MacAskill 14:37If you've got a dictatorship, then you've got single person ruling the society. That means it's heavily contingent on the views, values, beliefs, and personality of that person.Scientific talentDwarkesh Patel 14:48Going back to the second nation, in the book, you're very concerned about fertility. It seems your model about scientific and technological progress happens is number of people times average researcher productivity. If resource productivity is declining and the number of people isn't growing that fast, then that's concerning.Will MacAskill 15:07Yes, number of people times fraction of the population devoted to R&D.Dwarkesh Patel 15:11Thanks for the clarification. It seems that there have been a lot of intense concentrations of talent and progress in history. Venice, Athens, or even something like FTX, right? There are 20 developers making this a multibillion dollar company—do these examples suggest that organization and congregation of researchers matter more than the total amount?Will MacAskill 15:36The model works reasonably well. Throughout history, you start from a very low technological baseline compared to today. Most people aren't even trying to innovate. One argument for why Baghdad lost its Scientific Golden Age is because the political landscape changed such that what was incentivized was theological investigation rather than scientific investigation in the 10th/11th century AD.Similarly, one argument for why Britain had a scientific and industrial revolution rather than Germany was because all of the intellectual talent in Germany was focused on making amazing music. That doesn't compound in the way that making textiles does. If you look at like Sparta versus Athens, what was the difference? They had different cultures and intellectual inquiry was more rewarded in Athens.Because they're starting from a lower base, people trying to do something that looks like what we now think of as intellectual inquiry have an enormous impact.Dwarkesh Patel 16:58If you take an example like Bell Labs, the low-hanging fruit is gone by the late 20th century. You have this one small organization that has six Nobel Prizes. Is this a coincidence?Will MacAskill 17:14I wouldn't say that at all. The model we’re working with is the size of the population times the fraction of the population doing R&D. It's the simplest model you can have. Bell Labs is punching above its weight. You can create amazing things from a certain environment with the most productive people and putting them in an environment where they're ten times more productive than they would otherwise be.However, when you're looking at the grand sweep of history, those effects are comparatively small compared to the broader culture of a society or the sheer size of a population.Longtermist institutional reformDwarkesh Patel 18:00I want to talk about your paper on longtermist institutional reform. One of the things you advocate in this paper is that we should have one of the houses be dedicated towards longtermist priorities. Can you name some specific performance metrics you would use to judge or incentivize the group of people who make up this body?Will MacAskill 18:23The thing I'll caveat with longtermist institutions is that I’m pessimistic about them. If you're trying to represent or even give consideration to future people, you have to face the fact that they're not around and they can't lobby for themselves. However, you could have an assembly of people who have some legal regulatory power. How would you constitute that? My best guess is you have a random selection from the population? How would you ensure that incentives are aligned?In 30-years time, their performance will be assessed by a panel of people who look back and assess the policies’ effectiveness. Perhaps the people who are part of this assembly have their pensions paid on the basis of that assessment. Secondly, the people in 30-years time, both their policies and their assessment of the previous 30-years previous assembly get assessed by another assembly, 30-years after that, and so on. Can you get that to work? Maybe in theory—I’m skeptical in practice, but I would love some country to try it and see what happens.There is some evidence that you can get people to take the interests of future generations more seriously by just telling them their role. There was one study that got people to put on ceremonial robes, and act as trustees of the future. And they did make different policy recommendations than when they were just acting on the basis of their own beliefs and self-interest.Dwarkesh Patel 20:30If you are on that board that is judging these people, is there a metric like GDP growth that would be good heuristics for assessing past policy decisions?Will MacAskill 20:48There are some things you could do: GDP growth, homelessness, technological progress. I would absolutely want there to be an expert assessment of the risk of catastrophe. We don't have this yet, but imagine a panel of super forecasters predicting the chance of a war between great powers occurring in the next ten years that gets aggregated into a war index.That would be a lot more important than the stock market index. Risk of catastrophe would be helpful to feed into because you wouldn't want something only incentivizing economic growth at the expense of tail risks.Dwarkesh Patel 21:42Would that be your objection to a scheme like Robin Hanson’s about maximizing the expected future GDP using prediction markets and making decisions that way?Will MacAskill 21:50Maximizing future GDP is an idea I associate with Tyler Cowen. With Robin Hanson’s idea of voting on values but betting on beliefs, if people can vote on what collection of goods they want, GDP and unemployment might be good metrics. Beyond that, it's pure prediction markets. It's something I'd love to see tried. It’s an idea of speculative political philosophy about how a society could be extraordinarily different in structure that is incredibly neglected.Do I think it'll work in practice? Probably not. Most of these ideas wouldn't work. Prediction markets can be gamed or are simply not liquid enough. There hasn’t been a lot of success in prediction markets compared to forecasting. Perhaps you can solve these things. You have laws about what things can be voted on or predicted in the prediction market, you could have government subsidies to ensure there's enough liquidity. Overall, it's likely promising and I'd love to see it tried out on a city-level or something.Dwarkesh Patel 23:13Let’s take a scenario where the government starts taking the impact on the long-term seriously and institutes some reforms to integrate that perspective. As an example, you can take a look at the environmental movement. There're environmental review boards that will try to assess the environmental impact of new projects and repeal any proposals based on certain metrics.The impact here, at least in some cases, has been that groups that have no strong, plausible interest in the environment are able to game these mechanisms in order to prevent projects that would actually help the environment. With longtermism, it takes a long time to assess the actual impact of something, but policymakers are tasked with evaluating the long term impacts of something. Are you worried that it'd be a system that'd be easy to game by malicious actors? And they'd ask, “What do you think went wrong with the way that environmentalism was codified into law?”Will MacAskill 24:09It's potentially a devastating worry. You create something to represent future people, but they're not allowed to lobby themselves (it can just be co-opted). My understanding of environmental impact statements has been similar. Similarly, it's not like the environment can represent itself—it can't say what its interests are. What is the right answer there? Maybe there are speculative proposals about having a representative body that assesses these things and elect jobs by people in 30-years time. That's the best we've got at the moment, but we need a lot more thought to see if any of these proposals would be robust for the long term rather than things that are narrowly-focused.Regulation to have liability insurance for dangerous bio labs is not about trying to represent the interests of future generations. But, it's very good for the long-term. At the moment, if longtermists are trying to change the government, let's focus on a narrow set of institutional changes that are very good for the long-term even if they're not in the game of representing the future. That's not to say I'm opposed to all such things. But, there are major problems with implementation for any of them.Dwarkesh Patel 25:35If we don't know how we would do it correctly, did you have an idea of how environmentalism could have been codified better? Why was that not a success in some cases?Will MacAskill 25:46Honestly, I don't have a good understanding of that. I don't know if it's intrinsic to the matter or if you could’ve had some system that wouldn't have been co-opted in the long-term.Are companies longtermist?Dwarkesh Patel 25:56Theoretically, the incentives of our most long-term U.S. institutions is to maximize future cash flow. Explicitly and theoretically, they should have an incentive to do the most good they can for their own company—which implies that the company can’t be around if there’s an existential risk…Will MacAskill 26:18I don't think so. Different institutions have different rates of decay associated with them. So, a corporation that is in the top 200 biggest companies has a half-life of only ten years. It’s surprisingly short-lived. Whereas, if you look at universities Oxford and Cambridge are 800 years old. University of Bologna is even older. These are very long-lived institutions.For example, Corpus Christi at Oxford was making a decision about having a new tradition that would occur only every 400 years. It makes that kind of decision because it is such a long-lived institution. Similarly, the legends can be even longer-lived again. That type of natural half-life really affects the decisions a company would make versus a university versus a religious institution.Dwarkesh Patel 27:16Does that suggest that there's something fragile and dangerous about trying to make your institution last for a long time—if companies try to do that and are not able to?Will MacAskill 27:24Companies are composed of people. Is it in the interest of a company to last for a long time? Is it in the interests of the people who constitute the company (like the CEO and the board and the shareholders) for that company to last a long time? No, they don't particularly care. Some of them do, but most don't. Whereas other institutions go both ways. This is the issue of lock-in that I talked about at length in What We Owe The future: you get moments of plasticity during the formation of a new institution.Whether that’s the Christian church or the Constitution of the United States, you lock-in a certain set of norms. That can be really good. Looking back, the U.S. Constitution seems miraculous as the first democratic constitution. As I understand it, it was created over a period of four months seems to have stood the test of time. Alternatively, lock-in norms could be extremely dangerous. There were horrible things in the U.S. Constitution like the legal right to slavery proposed as a constitutional amendment. If that had locked in, it would have been horrible. It's hard to answer in the abstract because it depends on the thing that's persisting for a long time.Living in an era of plasticityDwarkesh Patel 28:57You say in the book that you expect our current era to be a moment of plasticity. Why do you think that is?Will MacAskill 29:04There are specific types of ‘moments of plasticity’ for two reasons. One is a world completely unified in a way that's historically unusual. You can communicate with anyone instantaneously and there's a great diversity of moral views. We can have arguments, like people coming on your podcast can debate what's morally correct. It's plausible to me that one of many different sets of moral views become the most popular ultimately.Secondly, we're at this period where things can really change. But, it's a moment of plasticity because it could plausibly come to an end — and the moral change that we're used to could end in the coming decades. If there was a single global culture or world government that preferred ideological conformity, combined with technology, it becomes unclear why that would end over the long-term? The key technology here is Artificial Intelligence. The point in time (which may be sooner than we think) where the rulers of the world are digital rather than biological, that [ideological conformity] could persist.Once you've got that and a global hegemony of a single ideology, there's not much reason for that set of values to change over time. You've got immortal leaders and no competition. What are the other kind of sources of value-change over time? I think they can be accounted for too.Dwarkesh Patel 30:46Isn't the fact that we are in a time of interconnectedness that won't last if we settle space — isn't that bit of reason for thinking that lock-in is not especially likely? If your overlords are millions of light years away, how well can they control you?Will MacAskill 31:01The “whether” you have is whether the control will happen before the point of space settlement. If we took to space one day, and there're many different settlements and different solar systems pursuing different visions of the good, then you're going to maintain diversity for a very long time (given the physics of the matter).Once a solar system has been settled, it's very hard for other civilizations to come along and conquer you—at least if we're at a period of technological maturity where there aren't groundbreaking technologies to be discovered. But, I'm worried that the control will happen earlier. I'm worried the control might happen this century, within our lifetimes. I don't think it’s very likely, but it's seriously on the table - 10% or something?Dwarkesh Patel 31:53Hm, right. Going back to the long-term of the longtermism movement, there are many instructive foundations that were set up about a century ago like the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation. But, they don't seem to be especially creative or impactful today. What do you think went wrong? Why was there, if not value drift, some decay of competence and leadership and insight?Will MacAskill 32:18I don't have strong views about those particular examples, but I have two natural thoughts. For organizations that want to persist a long time and keep having an influence for a long time, they’ve historically specified their goals in far too narrow terms. One fun example is Benjamin Franklin. He invested a thousand pounds for each of the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to pay out after 100 years and then 200 years for different fractions of the amount invested. But, he specified it to help blacksmith apprentices. You might think this doesn't make much sense when you’re in the year 2000. He could have invested more generally: for the prosperity of people in Philadelphia and Boston. It would have had plausibly more impact.The second is a ‘regression to the mean’ argument. You have some new foundation and it's doing an extraordinary amount of good as the Rockefeller Foundation did. Over time, if it's exceptional in some dimension, it's probably going to get closer to average on that dimension. This is because you’re changing the people involved. If you've picked exceptionally competent and farsighted people, the next generation are statistically going to be less so.Dwarkesh Patel 33:40Going back to that hand problem: if you specify your mission too narrowly and it doesn't make sense in the future—is there a trade off? If you're too broad, you make space for future actors—malicious or uncreative—to take the movement in ways that you would not approve of? With regards to doing good for Philadelphia, what if it turns into something that Ben Franklin would not have thought is good for Philadelphia?Will MacAskill 34:11It depends on what your values and views are. If Benjamin Franklin only cared about blacksmith's apprentices, then he was correct to specify it. But my own values tend to be quite a bit more broad than that. Secondly, I expect people in the future to be smarter and more capable. It’s certainly the trend over time. In which case, if we’re sharing similar broad goals, and they're implementing it in a different way, then they have it.How good can the future be?Dwarkesh Patel 34:52Let's talk about how good we should expect the future to be. Have you come across Robin Hanson’s argument that we’ll end up being subsistence-level ems because there'll be a lot of competition and minimizing compute per digital person will create a barely-worth-living experience for every entity?Will MacAskill 35:11Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument. But, we should distinguish the idea that ems are at subsistence level from the idea that we would have bad lives. So subsistence means that you get a balance of income per capita and population growth such that being poorer would cause deaths to outweigh additional births.That doesn't tell you about their well-being. You could be very poor as an emulated being but be in bliss all the time. That's perfectly consistent with the Malthusian theory. It might seem far away from the best possible future, but it could still be very good. At subsistence, those ems could still have lives that are thousands of times better than ours.Dwarkesh Patel 36:02Speaking of being poor and happy, there was a very interesting section in the chapter where you mentioned the study you had commissioned: you were trying to find out if people in the developing world find life worth living. It turns out that 19% of Indians would not want to relive their life every moment. But, 31% of Americans said that they would not want to relive their life at every moment? So, why are Indians seemingly much happier at less than a tenth of the GDP per capita?Will MacAskill 36:29I think the numbers are lower than that from memory, at least. From memory, it’s something more like 9% of Indians wouldn't want to live their lives again if they had the option, and 13% of Americans said they wouldn’t. You are right on the happiness metric, though. The Indians we surveyed were more optimistic about their lives, happier with their lives than people in the US were. Honestly, I don't want to generalize too far from that because we were sampling comparatively poor Americans to comparatively well-off Indians. Perhaps it's just a sample effect.There are also weird interactions with Hinduism and the belief in reincarnation that could mess up the generalizability of this. On one hand, I don't want to draw any strong conclusion from that. But, it is pretty striking as a piece of information, given that you find people's well-being in richer countries considerably happier than poorer countries, on average.Dwarkesh Patel 37:41I guess you do generalize in a sense that you use it as evidence that most lives today are living, right?Will MacAskill 37:50Exactly. So, I put together various bits of evidence, where approximately 10% of people in the United States and 10% of people in India seem to think that their lives are net negative. They think they contain more suffering than happiness and wouldn't want to be reborn and live the same life if they could.There's another scripture study that looks at people in United States/other wealthy countries, and asks them how much of their conscious life they'd want to skip if they could. Skipping here means that blinking would reach you to the end of whatever activity you're engaging with. For example, perhaps I hate this podcast so much that I would rather be unconscious than be talking to you. In which case, I'd have the option of skipping, and it would be over after 30 minutes.If you look at that, and then also asked people about the trade offs they would be willing to make as a measure of intensity of how much they're enjoying a certain experience, you reach the conclusion that a little over 10% of people regarded their life that day as being surveyed worse than if they'd been unconscious the entire day.Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most importantDwarkesh Patel 39:18Jumping topics here a little bit, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, you said that you expect scientists who are explicitly trying to maximize their impact might have an adverse impact because they might be ignoring the foundational research that wouldn't be obvious in this way of thinking, but might be more important.Do you think this could be a general problem with longtermism? If you were trying to find the most important things that are important long-term, you might be missing things that wouldn't be obvious thinking this way?Will MacAskill 39:48Yeah, I think that's a risk. Among the ways that people could argue against my general set of views, I argue that we should be doing fairly specific and targeted things like trying to make AI safe, well-govern the rise of AI, reduce worst-case pandemics that can kill us all, prevent a Third World War, ensure that good values are promoted, and avoid value lock-in. But, some people could argue (and people like Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison do), that it's very hard to predict the future impact of your actions.It's a mug's game to even try. Instead, you should look at the things that have done loads of good consistently in the past, and try to do the same things. In particular, they might argue that means technological progress or boosting economic growth. I dispute that. It's not something I can give a completely knock-down argument to because we don’t know when we will find out who's right. Maybe in thousand-years time. But one piece of evidence is the success of forecasters in general. This also was true for Tyler Cowen, but people in Effective Altruism were realizing that the Coronavirus pandemic was going to be a big deal for them. At an early stage, they were worrying about pandemics far in advance. There are some things that are actually quite predictable.For example, Moore's Law has held up for over 70 years. The idea that AI systems are gonna get much larger and leading models are going to get more powerful are on trend. Similarly, the idea that we will be soon be able to develop viruses of unprecedented destructive power doesn’t feel too controversial. Even though it’s hard to predict loads of things, there are going to be tons of surprises. There are some things, especially when it comes to fairly long-standing technological trends, that we can make reasonable predictions — at least about the range of possibilities that are on the table.Dwarkesh Patel 42:19It sounds like you're saying that the things we know are important now. But, if something didn't turn out, a thousand years ago, looking back to be very important, it wouldn't be salient to us now?Will MacAskill 42:31What I was saying with me versus Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, who is correct? We will only get that information in a thousand-years time because we're talking about impactful strategies for the long-term. We might get suggestive evidence earlier. If me and others engaging in longtermism are making specific, measurable forecasts about what is going to happen with AI, or advances in biotechnology, and then are able to take action such that we are clearly reducing certain risks, that's pretty good evidence in favor of our strategy.Whereas, they're doing all sorts of stuff, but not make firm predictions about what's going to happen, but then things pop out of that that are good for the long-term (say we measure this in ten-years time), that would be good evidence for their view.Dwarkesh Patel 43:38You were saying earlier about the contingency in technology implies that given their worldview, even if you're trying to maximize what in the past is at the most impact, if what's had the most impact in the past is changing values, then economic growth might be the most important thing? Or trying to change the rate of economic growth?Will MacAskill 43:57I really do take the argument seriously of how people have acted in the past, especially for people trying to make a long-lasting impact. What things that they do that made sense and whatnot. So, towards the end of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians had this longtermist wave where they started taking the interests of future generations very seriously. Their main concern was Britain running out of coal, and therefore, future generations would be impoverished. It's pretty striking because they had a very bad understanding of how the economy works. They hadn't predicted that we would be able to transition away from coal with continued innovation.Secondly, they had enormously wrong views about how much coal and fossil fuels there were in the world. So, that particular action didn't make any sense given what we know now. In fact, that particular action of trying to keep coal in the ground, given Britain at the time where we're talking about much lower amounts of coal—so small that the climate change effect is negligible at that level—probably would have been harmful.But, we could look at other things that John Stuart Mill could have done such promoting better values. He campaigned for women's suffrage. He was the first British MP. In fact, even the first politician in the world to promote women's suffrage - that seems to be pretty good. That seems to have stood the test of time. That's one historical data point. But potentially, we can learn a more general lesson there.AI and the centralization of powerDwarkesh Patel 45:36Do you think the ability of your global policymakers to come to a consensus is on net, a good or a bad thing? On the positive, maybe it helps around some dangerous tech from taking off, but on the negative side, prevent human challenge trials that cause some lock-in in the future. On net, what do you think about that trend?Will MacAskill 45:54The question of global integration, you're absolutely right, it's double-sided. One hand, it can help us reduce global catastrophic risks. The fact that the world was able to come come together and ban Chlorofluorocarbons was one of the great events of the last 50 years, allowing the hole in the ozone layer to to repair itself. But on the other hand, if it means we all converge to one monoculture and lose out on diversity, that's potentially bad. We could lose out on the most possible value that way.The solution is doing the good bits and not having the bad bits. For example, in a liberal constitution, you can have a country that is bound in certain ways by its constitution and by certain laws yet still enables a flourishing diversity of moral thought and different ways of life. Similarly, in the world, you can have very strong regulation and treaties that only deal with certain global public goods like mitigation of climate change, prevention of development of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction without having some very strong-arm global government that implements a particular vision of the world. Which way are we going at the moment? It seems to me we've been going in a pretty good and not too worrying direction. But, that could change.Dwarkesh Patel 47:34Yeah, it seems the historical trend is when you have a federated political body that even if constitutionally, the Central Powers constrain over time, they tend to gain more power. You can look at the U.S., you can look at the European Union. But yeah, that seems to be the trend.Will MacAskill 47:52Depending on the culture that's embodied there, it's potentially a worry. It might not be if the culture itself is liberal and promoting of moral diversity and moral change and moral progress. But, that needn't be the case.Dwarkesh Patel 48:06Your theory of moral change implies that after a small group starts advocating for a specific idea, it may take a century or more before that idea reaches common purchase. To the extent that you think this is a very important century (I know you have disagreements about that with with others), does that mean that there isn't enough time for longtermism to gain by changing moral values?Will MacAskill 48:32There are lots of people I know and respect fairly well who think that Artificial General Intelligence will likely lead to singularity-level technological progress and extremely rapid rate of technological progress within the next 10-20 years. If so, you’re right. Value changes are something that pay off slowly over time.I talk about moral change taking centuries historically, but it can be much faster today. The growth of the Effective Altruism movement is something I know well. If that's growing at something like 30% per year, compound returns mean that it's not that long. That's not growth. That's not change that happens on the order of centuries.If you look at other moral movements like gay rights movement, very fast moral change by historical standards. If you're thinking that we've got ten years till the end of history, then don't broadly try and promote better values. But, we should have a very significant probability mass on the idea that we will not hit some historical end of this century. In those worlds, promoting better values could pay off like very well.Dwarkesh Patel 49:59Have you heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet?Will MacAskill 50:03I have indeed heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet, and I was tempted as a gimmick to try it. As I'm sure you know, potato is close to a superfood, and you could survive indefinitely on butter mashed potatoes if you occasionally supplement with something like lentils and oats.Dwarkesh Patel 50:25Hm, interesting. Question about your career: why are you still a professor? Does it still allow you to the things that you would otherwise have been doing like converting more SBF’s and making moral philosophy arguments for EA? Curious about that.Will MacAskill 50:41It's fairly open to me what I should do, but I do spend significant amounts of time co-founding organizations or being on the board of those organizations I've helped to set up. More recently, working closely with the Future Fund, SBF’s new foundation, and helping them do as much good as possible. That being said, if there's a single best guess for what I want to do longer term, and certainly something that plays to my strengths better, it's developing ideas, trying to get the big picture roughly right, and then communicating them in a way that's understandable and gets more people to get off their seats and start to do a lot of good for the long-term. I’ve had a lot of impact that way. From that perspective, having an Oxford professorship is pretty helpful.The problems with academiaDwarkesh Patel 51:34You mentioned in the book and elsewhere that there's a scarcity of people thinking about big picture questions—How contingent is history? How are people happy generally?—Are these questions that are too hard for other people? Or they don't care enough? What's going on? Why are there so few people talking about this?Will MacAskill 51:54I just think there are many issues that are enormously important but are just not incentivized anywhere in the world. Companies don't incentivize work on them because they’re too big picture. Some of these questions are, “Is the future good, rather than bad? If there was a global civilizational collapse, would we recover? How likely is a long stagnation?” There’s almost no work done on any of these topics. Companies aren't interested too grand in scale.Academia has developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems. Partly, that's because they fall through the cracks of different disciplines. Partly because they seem too grand or too speculative. Academia is much more in the mode of making incremental gains in our understanding. It didn't always used to be that way.If you look back before the institutionalization of academic research, you weren't a real philosopher unless you had some grand unifying theory of ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Probably the natural sciences too and economics. I'm not saying that all of academic inquiry should be like that. But should there be some people whose role is to really think about the big picture? Yes.Dwarkesh Patel 53:20Will I be able to send my kids to MacAskill University? What's the status on that project?Will MacAskill 53:25I'm pretty interested in the idea of creating a new university. There is a project that I've been in discussion about with another person who's fairly excited about making it happen. Will it go ahead? Time will tell. I think you can do both research and education far better than it currently exists. It's extremely hard to break in or creating something that's very prestigious because the leading universities are hundreds of years old. But maybe it's possible. I think it would could generate enormous amounts of value if we were able to pull it off.Dwarkesh Patel 54:10Excellent, alright. So the book is What We Owe The Future. I understand pre-orders help a lot, right? It was such an interesting read. How often does somebody write a book about the questions they consider to be the most important even if they're not the most important questions? Big picture thinking, but also looking at very specific questions and issues that come up. Super interesting read.Will MacAskill 54:34Great. Well, thank you so much!Dwarkesh Patel 54:38Anywhere else they can find you? Or any other information they might need to know?Will MacAskill 54:39Yeah, sure. What We Owe The Future is out on August 16 in the US and first of September in the United Kingdom. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @WillMcCaskill. If you want to try and use your time or money to do good, Giving What We Can is an organization that encourages people to take a pledge to give a significant fraction of the income (10% or more) to the charities that do the most good. It has a list of recommended charities. 80,000 Hours—if you want to use your career to do good—is a place to go for advice on what careers have the biggest impact at all. They provide one-on-one coaching too.If you're feeling inspired and want to do good in the world, you care about future people and I want to help make their lives go better, then, as well as reading What We Owe The Future, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 hours are the sources you can go to and get involved.Dwarkesh Patel 55:33Awesome, thanks so much for coming on the podcast! It was a lot of fun.Will MacAskill 54:39Thanks so much, I loved it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Slowing down AI progress is an underexplored alignment strategy, published by Michael Huang on July 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. LessWrong user "Norman Borlaug" with an interesting post on reducing existential risk through deliberate overregulation of AI development: In the latest Metaculus forecasts, we have 13 years left until some lab somewhere creates AGI, and perhaps far less than that until the blueprints to create it are published and nothing short of a full-scale nuclear war will stop someone somewhere from doing so. The community strategy (insofar as there even is one) is to bet everything on getting a couple of technical alignment folks onto the team at top research labs in the hopes that they will miraculously solve alignment before the mad scientists in the office next door turn on the doomsday machine. While I admit there is at least a chance this might work, and it IS worth doing technical alignment research, the indications we have so far from the most respected people in the field are that this is an extremely hard problem and there is at least a non-zero chance it is fundamentally unsolvable. There are a dozen other strategies we could potentially deploy to achieve alignment, but they all depend on someone not turning on the doomsday machine. But thus far we have almost completely ignored the class of strategies that might buy more time. The cutting edge of thought on this front seems to come from one grumpy former EA founder on Twitter who isn't even trying that hard. From Kerry Vaughan's Twitter thread: I've recently learned that this is a spicy take on AI Safety: AGI labs (eg OpenAI, DeepMind, and others) are THE CAUSE of the fundamental problem the AI Safety field faces. I thought this was obvious until very recently. Since it's not, I should explain my position. (I'll note that while I single out OpenAI and DeepMind here, that's only because they appear to be advancing the cutting edge the most. This critique applies to any company or academic researcher that spends their time working to solve the bottlenecks to building AGI.) To vastly oversimply the situation, you can think of AI Safety as a race. In one corner you have the AGI builders who are trying to create AGI as fast as possible. In the other corner, you have people trying to make sure AGI will be aligned with human goals once we build it. If AGI gets built before we know how to align it, it might be CATASTROPHIC. Fortunately, aligning an AGI is unlikely to be impossible. So, given enough time and effort into the problem, we will eventually solve it. This means the actual enemy is time. If we have enough time to both find capable people and have them work productively on the problem, we will eventually win. If not, we lose. I think the fundamental dynamic is really just that simple. AGI labs like OAI and DeepMind have it as their MISSION to decrease the time we have. Their FOUNDING OBJECTIVE is to build AGI and they are very clearly and obviously trying as hard as they can to do just that. They raise money, hire talent, etc. all premised on this goal. Every day an AGI engineer at OpenAI or DeepMind shows up to work and tries to solve the current bottlenecks in creating AGI, we lose just a little bit of time. Every day they show up to work, the odds of victory get a little bit lower. My very bold take is that THIS IS BAD Now you might be thinking: "Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman are not psychopaths or morons. If they get close to AGI without solving alignment they can just not deploy the AGI." There are a number of problems with this, but the most obvious is: they're still robbing us of time. Every. Single. Day. the AGI labs are steadily advancing the state of the art on building AGI. With every new study they publish, researcher they train, and technology they commercialize, ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Slowing down AI progress is an underexplored alignment strategy, published by Norman Borlaug on July 12, 2022 on LessWrong. The emotional burden of watching the world end My current beliefs about AI timelines have made my life significantly worse. I find thoughts about the ever-shrinking timeline to AGI invading nearly every aspect of my life. Every choice now seems to be affected by the trajectory of this horrible technology. Based on the responses in this post and others, many if not most people on this forum have been affected in a similar way. AI is the black hole swallowing all other considerations about the future. Frankly, I feel a good deal of anger about the current state of affairs. All these otherwise thoughtful and nice people are working to build potentially world-ending technology as fast as possible. I'm angry so few people are paying any attention to the danger. I'm angry that invasive thoughts about AGI destroying the world are making it harder for me to focus on work that might have a non-zero chance of saving it. And I'm frustrated we've been so closed-minded in our approach to solving this problem. The current situation is almost exactly analogous to the creation of the atomic bomb during World War 2. There's a bunch of very smart people gathered together, supplied with a fuckton of money by powerful groups, working towards the same destructive goal. There is social proof all around them that they are doing the right thing. There are superficially plausible reasons to think that everything will turn out fine. There is token engagement with the concerns raised by people concerned about the implications of the technology. But at the end of the day, the combination of personal incentives, social proof and outside impetus make everyone turn their head and ignore the danger. On the rare occasion that people are convinced to leave, it's almost always the most conscientious, most cautious people, ensuring the remaining team is even less careful. There is so much magical thinking going on among otherwise intelligent people. Everyone seems to be operating on the assumption that no technology can destroy us, that everything will magically turn out fine, despite the numerous historical examples of new inventions destroying or nearly destroying the world (see the Cuban Missile Crisis or the great oxidation event when oxygen-producing bacteria extincted themselves and most other life on earth and caused a 300 million year ice age). Frankly I've found the response from the EA/rationalist community has been pretty lackluster so far. Every serious solution that has been proposed revolves around solving alignment before we make AGI, yet I know ZERO people who are working on slowing down capabilities progress. Hell, until just a month ago, EA orgs like 80,000 hours were RECOMMENDING people join AI research labs and work on CREATING superintelligence. The justifications I've read for this behavior always seem to be along the lines of "we don't want to alienate the people working at top AI orgs because we feel that will be counter-productive to our goals of convincing them that AI alignment is important." Where has this strategy gotten us? Does the current strategy of getting a couple of members of the EA/Rationalist community onto the safety teams at major AI orgs actually have a chance at working? And is it worth foregoing all efforts to slow down progress towards AGI? The goals of DeepMind, OpenAI, and all the other top research labs are fundamentally opposed to the goal of alignment. The founding goal of Deepmind is to "solve intelligence, then use that to solve everything else." That mission statement has been operationalized as paying a bunch of extremely smart people ridiculous salaries to create and distribute the blueprints for (potentially) world-ending AGI...

Nate explains how our culture is "energy blind" and the implications. The YouTube video, featuring charts and graphs, of this podcast is available now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVjhb8Nu1Sk 00:35 - Jason's info + book, Post Carbon Institute, Farmland LP, CSAs 02:57 - What is a CSA 04:39 - Biodiversity and geography of the Amazon rainforest and the Andes 05:14 - How will the Amazon and Andes change with climate change 06:17 - The Future is Rural 06:56 - Net energy positive 07:18 - Optimal foraging theory 08:46 - Chewing the cud and ruminant digestion 09:32 - Fiber, cellulose and human digestion 10:16 - NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium/Potash) 11:01 - Haber Bosch process 14:30 - The Law of Return 15:11 - What is soil? Is it different from dirt? 16:30 - Hydroponics 17:10 - What makes healthy soil? (structure, microbiome, nutrients) 17:24 - Malabon soil 19:49 - How many farms are managing for healthy soils 20:10 - At the current rate our topsoil will be gone in 60 years 20:54 - What percentage of the US labor force are farmers? (~1%) 21:22 - How has the labor force shifted from pre-industrial times? (70-90%) 22:35 - Modern agriculture is an energy sink 23:17 - Past food systems were energy positive (10:1-5:1) 23:35 - The Oil Drum essay (EROI on Nate's potatoes) 25:04 - It takes 10-14 calories to produce, process, and transport every 1 calorie of food we eat 26:50 - Over the last hundred years we have had more energy available every year 27:03 - Trophic pyramids 27:51 - Entropy 31:01 - Supply chain disruptions 31:55 - Fossil fuel depletion 33:48 - Conventional crops no longer have the genes to be grown in organic agriculture 37:16 - Heavy mechanization has led to heavy specialization and regionalization 39:27 - Smaller farms have higher energy returns and higher yields 44:27 - ½ a hectare is needed to feed one person (variation from 2/10th to a whole hectare) 47:46 - Dennis Meadows TGS Episode 51:33 - Potato Famine in Ireland 53:03 - Problems with modern industrial animal agriculture (CAFOs) 54:31 - Diets were tailored to fit the land they're based in 56:13 - In Minnesota there are more pigs than people 56:20 - Population numbers of our livestock 1:00:05 - Energy blindness 1:00:23 - Norman Borlaug and Paul Ehrlich 1:01:09 - Permaculture 1:07:34 - The world's amazing and diverse life 1:09:03 - Chuck Watson TGS Episode 1 and 2 on Nuclear Risk 1:10:20 - Nature is remarkably resilient 1:10:37 - Building back healthy soil

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee    Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1510 Death of Sandro Botticelli, Italian Renaissance master.  His painting Allegory of Abundance or Autumn is one of his most elaborate and detailed drawings, and it depicts an abundance of flowers and fruits. Sandro painted idyllic garden scenes filled with beautiful women and men from the classical period. His painting, Primavera, depicts nine springtime gods and goddesses from classical mythology in a garden. Venus, the goddess of love, presides over the Garden of the Hesperides. To her right, Flora, the goddess of flowers, sprinkles roses. The garden features orange and laurel trees and dozens of other species of plants.   1642 On this day, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, French military officer, catches his first glimpse of Montreal's landscape. He is recognized as the founder of Fort Ville-Marie (modern-day Montreal) in New France (Province of Quebec, Canada). In George Waldo Browne's 1905 book, The St. Lawrence River: Historical, Legendary, Picturesque, he wrote, On the 17th of May, the rounded slopes of Mount Royal, clad in the delicate green foliage of spring, burst into sight, stirring the hearts of the anxious beholders with newfound joy. They were delighted with the scenery. The fragrance of the springing forest permeated the balmy air, and, what was dearer far to them, over the water and over the landscape, rested an air of peace quite in keeping with their pious purpose. Maisonneuve was the first to step upon the land, and as the others followed him... they fell upon their knees, sending up their songs of praise and thanksgiving. Their first work was to erect an altar at a favorable spot within sight and sound of the riverbank, the women decorating the rough woodwork with some of the wildflowers growing in abundance upon the island, until the whole, looked very beautiful.  Then every member of the party... knelt in solemn silence while M. Barthelemy Vimont... performed ...high mass. As he closed, he addressed his little congregation with these prophetic words: You are a grain of mustard seed that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth.   1810 Death of Robert Tannahill, Scottish poet, and lyricist. Remembered as the 'Weaver Poet,' Robert was born in Paisley and is often hailed as Paisley's own Robert Burns, as his work is said to rival Robert Burns.  Today in Paisley, a stunning 50ft high mural of a young Robert Tannahill was painted by Mark Worst, collaborating with Paisley Housing Association. The mural overlooks where Robert Tannahill was born on Castle Street in 1774. One of Robert's most beloved songs is Will Ye Go Lassie, Go. The lyrics mention picking Wild Mountain Thyme, a plant known botanically as Thymus serpyllum (TY-mus sir-PIE-lum). Wild Mountain Thyme is a showy, wide growing groundcover from the Old World and has beautiful rose-red flowers and glossy deep green, mat-forming foliage. In the song, the thyme has grown in and around the heather. O the summer time has come And the trees are sweetly bloomin' The wild mountain thyme Grows around the bloomin' heather Will ye go, lassie, go? And we'll all go together To pull wild mountain thyme All around the bloomin' heather Will ye go, lassie, go?   1885 Birth of Elvin Charles Stakman, American plant pathologist. Elvin is remembered for his work identifying and combatting diseases in wheat. In 1917, he married fellow a  plant pathologist named Estelle Louise Jensen. He also encouraged Norman Borlaug to pursue his career in phytopathology after Norman's job at the Forest Service was eliminated due to budget cuts. Elvin was Norman's teacher. And Norman went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1970) after discovering dwarf wheat varieties that reduced famine in India, Pakistan, and other third world countries. In 1938, Elvin gave a speech entitled These Shifty Little Enemies that Destroy our Food Crops. During his talk, Elvin focused on one shifty little enemy in particular: rust. Rust is a parasitic fungus that feeds on phytonutrients in grain crops like wheat, oat, and barley. Today, Elvin is remembered with the naming of Stakman Hall - the building where Plant Pathology is taught - at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus.  In The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World, Charles Mann reflected, Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool—may be the tool—for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. “Botany,” he said, “is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation 150 Gardens You Need To Visit Before You Die by Stefanie Waldek  This book came out in 2022. Stefanie writes in her introduction: In 150 Gardens You Need to Visit Before You Die, I've shared a vast range of gardens, from immense botanical institutions with thousands of specimens, to smaller plots for quiet meditations, to museums that combine both artworks and plantings. I hope these brief introductions inspire you to plan a visit or two, whether in your hometown or on your global travels, so that you can enjoy the sights, smells, sounds, and stories of the world's best gardens.   The publisher writes: From Kew Gardens in London to the Singapore Botanical Gardens, and from Monet's garden at Giverny to the Zen garden of the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, this handsomely bound book captures in words and images the most notable features of these 150 glorious, not-to-be-missed gardens. An essential bucket list book for garden lovers! You can get a copy of 150 Gardens You Need To Visit Before You Die by Stefanie Waldek and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes.   Botanic Spark 1905 On this day, Louisa Yeomans King wrote in her garden journal about peonies. She published a year's worth of entries in her book, The Flower Garden Day by Day.  In 1902, Louisa and her husband moved to Michigan, where they built a home called Orchard House. With the help of a gardener named Frank Ackney, Louisa began to plan and create her garden. She also began writing about her Gardens. Soon, she gave lectures, contributed pieces to magazines, wrote columns, and organized garden clubs. She even became friends with prominent gardeners of her time like Gertrude Jekyll, Charles Sprague Sargent, and the landscape architects Fletcher Steele and Ellen Biddle Shipman. Louisa learned to garden during the heyday of American Garden Culture. Her garden writing in newspaper columns and magazine publications made her the most widely read American Garden author in the United States. Louisa's first book, "The Well-Considered Garden," the preface was written by her dear friend Gertrude Jekyll. In 1915, when the book debuted, it was considered an instant classic in garden literature. Louisa would go on to write a total of nine books. The garden estate known as Blithewold has a copy of "The Well-Considered Garden." Their particular text also contains a handwritten inscription along with Louisa's signature. The inscription borrows a quote from Sir William Temple, who said, "Gardening is an enjoyment and a possession for which no man is too high or too low." Louisa changed the quote and wrote, "Gardening is an enjoyment and a possession for which no woman is too high or too low." Louisa helped start the Garden Club of America and the Women's National Farm and Garden Association. She held leadership positions in both organizations. When her husband died suddenly in 1927, Louisa was forced to sell Orchard House. She moved to Hartford, New York, and bought a property she called Kingstree. This time, she set up a smaller garden. The size meant less work, which accommodated her writing and speaking commitments better. On this day, Louisa wrote in her journal this note of advice about the Peony: May 17. Disbud most of your peonies now; that is, of a cluster of buds, cut off all but the larger central one. Certain varieties, however, are considered more beautiful if left alone to flower as they will. Among these are Alsace Lorraine and La Rosiere.   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Get some water before you listen to this episode: I had to remind myself to drink multiple times during this episode. In this episode, we talk to health coach and host of the podcast "Salad with a Side of Fries," Jenn Trepeck. She talks with us about all of the complexities of the health and food systems that we are a part of (she makes a point of not talking about the healthcare system because in reality, what we have is hardly a system, it's a disaggregated set of actors that are responsible for your health that almost never talk to each other) and the various problems with all of them. For one thing, we have been told to ignore what our bodies tell us from a very young age: we are told to finish what is on our plates instead of listening to when we are actually full. For another thing, we have a totally unrepresentative and inapproproate set of standards that we use to measure "health": most metrics are based entirely off of men, as if women did not exist. The 2,000 calorie diet was created to prevent soldiers during World War 2 from dying of diseases like scurvy when rations were in short supply. BMI was created to make it easier for doctors to talk to patients about weight and because it is cheaper and easier to measure a simple data point like weight with a scale than it is to give patients a more comprehensive understanding of what makes up their body, such as by measuring what percentage of your body mass is fat and what percentage is muscle. We also talk about Big Pharma, GMOs, and how to figure out who to trust when it comes to health information given that so many actors in the nutrition and medical space have monetary incentives to lie or boas their studies, many of which have dubiously statistically significant results to begin with. Links: Jenn's podcast, "Salad with a Side of Fries": https://asaladwithasideoffries.com/ Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän. Note: In this episode, Jenn talked about the Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug and his invention of dwarf wheat. She mentions that dwarf wheat was invented to solve world hunger and did not, in fact, solve world hunger, and therefore suggested that we should go back to eating other forms of wheat because dwarf wheat causes gluten sensitivities. Upon further research after the episode, the articles we found mostly seem to suggest that although we have not solved world hunger, the invention of dwarf wheat has likely saved over a billion people from starvation, so we will allow you to judge for yourself how this use of GMO's might weigh against the current rise of gluten sensitivities. Some articles on Norman Borlaug: "The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-man-who-saved-a-billi_b_4099523 "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/im-the-villain/support

Two engineers get together to discuss two life essentials - food and money! Our food expert is Krish Ashok. Ashok is Global Head, Digital Workplace at TCS. He is a techie, a musician and an author. He talks about the science behind food, the history of food and offers a lot of food for thought for us to explore further. If you are interested, a good starting point is his famous book - Masala Lab. Our money expert is Deepak Shenoy. Deepak talks about the importance of managing your finances, the myths about investing, the fallacies that investors should avoid, and his take on cryptocurrencies. It is quite a treat to listen when he shares food metaphors to explain financial concepts. So listen in! Topics & References: 02:00 - Science of Indian food & cooking Refer - The parable of turkey and how things are done13:30 - Do modern food habits cause lifestyle diseases? 21:45 - Wait, it's the opposite? Butter is ok but the Naan is not? 25:30 - Basics of food everyone should follow Refer: Michael Pollan: Three Simple Rules for Eating37:00 - The play of sugar & salt 40:00 - People hate changing food habits 45:00 - Each of us processes the same flavor differently 49:00 - We don't like something because its unfamiliar, not necessarily bad 52:00 - Misconceptions about Food Refer: Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years56:00 - The myths of Genetic Modification Refer - The Story of Norman Borlaug, the American Scientist Who Helped Engineer India's Green Revolution01:01:00 - How do we make more people cook? (especially, the men) Refer - Apple Cider Vinegar Rasam01:07:00 - Does the online food delivery phenomenon change things for food and our food habits? 01:11:00 - Switching roles - Ashok Asks Deepak about Money 01:13:00 - Building a relationship with money Refer: Book: The Lexus and the Olive Tree01:17:30 - What money can do for you? 01:23:00 - How an adult should learn the basics of Finance? Refer: Book: An Economist Gets Lunch01:43:00 - How should salaried professionals think about Income Tax? 01:50:00 - Working as an employee Vs working as a businesses 01:54:00 - Understanding Inflation first before learning about investment returns Refer: What you know about inflation might be wrong02:01:00 - How do you make money work for you? 02:09:00 - How to allocate between Equity & Fixed Income? 02:11:00 - Ways for your money to make more money? 02:16:00 - Importance of diversification in Finance & Food 02:19:00 - How should one think about their own risk appetite? Refer: Harry Markowitz and Modern Portfolio TheoryRefer: How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking02:28:00 - Is there a tool that helps track personal financial growth? 02:37:00 - Deepak's thoughts on cryptocurrencies Refer: Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens)Refer: Selling Shovels in the New Startup Gold Rush You can buy Krish Ashok's book on the science of Food - Masala lab. You can buy Deepak Shenoy's book on investing - Money Wise. Check out our wealth management service - Capitalmind Wealth (PMS)

A complex web of factors affects our ability not only to meet nutritional needs, but also our efforts to sustain biodiversity and protect the environment. As the world's agricultural, environmental, and nutritional needs intersect—and often collide—how can nations, international organizations and consumers work together to reverse the damage by changing how we make, distribute, and buy food? And do we have the right to eat wrongly?Jessica Fanzo is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food & Agricultural Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University. She has previously worked as an advisor for various organizations and governments including the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Scaling Up Nutrition movement (SUN), the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Her latest book is Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? Inextricably bound together by food (OECD forum)It's Her Time: Jess Fanzo  (Worldwildlife.org)The Future of Food (video interview, CGTN)Twitter: @jessfanzoHost:Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik  @GlobalDevPodApple Google Spotify YouTubehttps://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/

The Bros discuss Norman Borlaug and the impact that he had on the world. Sit back and we save some lives! Check out the accompanying video on our Youtube Channel: https://youtu.be/6eYVZblGjsI Please visit https://www.historybros.com/. The History Bros Podcast: https://anchor.fm/history-bros The History Bros YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxB9iJN6Uj6MrIoSfUQ07Nw Please consider supporting us through Patreon. We would appreciate your support. https://www.patreon.com/thehistorybros Be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss out on podcasts or videos from The History Bros! History is everywhere. Go out and find it. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/history-bros/support