Podcasts about shape tomorrow

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 this episode, I talk about how small everyday actions — like paying your bus fare or parking thoughtfully — reflect the respect we have for others. Little choices shape the kind of community we live in. Are we doing our part for a better today and tomorrow?

Send us a textDr. Nina Siragusa, Ph.D., MBA, is the Strategy, Business, and Data & Digital Lead within the global R&D organization of Merck Healthcare KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. In this role, she leads strategic projects, manages business operations, and drives digital transformation.Previously, she served as Chief of Staff to Dr. Laura Matz, Chief Science and Technology Officer at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. As part of the Science and Technology Office Leadership Team, she was responsible for fostering cross-sectoral collaboration, innovation, and digitalization across Merck's three business sectors. She also spearheaded the company's efforts in Bioconvergence, a multidisciplinary approach that synergizes biology, engineering, data, and digitalization. This initiative promises groundbreaking advancements in healthcare and the life sciences, heralding a new era of scientific collaboration for a healthier, more sustainable future.Prior to that, Dr. Siragusa contributed to corporate innovation in several leadership roles:• As Biotechnology Lead of a synthetic biology innovation project,• As Senior Manager, responsible for creating strategic alignment and building high-performing teams, and• As Associate Director, focusing on sourcing innovative ideas to generate new business opportunities.Dr. Siragusa earned her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and conducted research in Europe and the USA, including at Yale University, before joining Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany in 2016.In 2024, she completed an MBA in Digital Transformation Management with a focus on Digital Leadership at Goethe Business School, Frankfurt, Germany.Dr. Siragusa is also the lead author of the recently published book, Bioconvergence Revolution: Challenges and Opportunities in Research Productivity. You can find it here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-61593-1Home Page Merck KGaA Darmstadt, Germany - https://www.emdgroup.com/en#NinaSiragusa #EMDGroup #MerckKGaADarmstadtGermany #Bioconvergence #Ethics #Collaboration #Fungi #NaturalProducts #Biomimicry #AI #DrugDiscovery #Bioremediation #TranslationalMedicine #SmartManufacturing #DigitalTwins #Supermind #MIT #ResearchFunding #Israel #STEM #Innovation #Science #Technology #Research #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #IraPastor #Podcast #Podcaster #Podcasting #ViralPodcastSupport the show

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. In episode 7 of Creative Refills, hosts Job and April reminisce on a busy summer and their adventures. They also look back on their project aspirations since episode 1 of the podcast and plan their lineup for the new year. Our host also talk about how different PLOTTER leather types develop patina over time. Finally, the episode ends with a preview of product news coming to PLOTTER USA in the winter season. Episode Show Note

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. In episode 6 of Creative Refills, hosts Job and April delve deep into their half-year reflections and address the central theme of this episode, creative blocks. They share their personal experiences using PLOTTER in managing their schedules, discussing how color-coded schedules and timeline features in their PLOTTER have improved their time management.  Episode 6 Show Notes

Aether is a molecular assembler platform that can extract lithium from previously inaccessible reserves. It uses robots and machine learning to search among trillions of enzymes for the right fit. Pavle is a first-time founder and almost college dropout (there's a story to that!) who's spent almost seven years building Aether and raising $49M along the way. In this episode, you'll learn these four important takeaways and much more. How he hopes to make the US the lithium capital of the world Which revenue models he's pursuing with mining partners How he'll use nondilutive funding to scale tech deployment Why “I don't know” is a powerful phrase to build trust

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. The fifth episode welcomes special guests from PLOTTER Japan: Takayuki Saito and CY to join Job in learning about the brand. Takayuki is the Director of PLOTTER and KNOX brands at Designphil, and he shares thoughts behind the various types of leathers available in PLOTTER's line up. The trio discusses different leather, process of procuring them, and behind-the-scenes of Shiranami. Episode 5 Show Notes

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. The third episode dives into the process of building habits, learning new skills, and gaining momentum when you're in a creative process. How does one start when a new project is on the horizon? The hosts share their own methods of practicing and hurdles when it comes to trying new things. The team also introduces a new Refill Memo Pad layout – Chart Grid, a unique layout for note-taking and organizing their thoughts. Finally, we also talk about the importance of mentorship and companionship during the creative process. Learn more about PLOTTER at https://plotterusa.com/ Episode 4 Show Notes

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. The third episode welcomes special guests from PLOTTER Japan: Takayuki Saito and CY to join Job in learning about the brand and some behind-the-scenes. Takayuki is the Director of PLOTTER and KNOX brands at Designphil, and he shares the experiences that led him to creating PLOTTER. The trio talked about their creative processes and how PLOTTER play a role in their lives. Learn more about PLOTTER at ⁠https://plotterusa.com/

Cordell Carter has helped 10K+ worldwide professionals, executives, and investors through his leadership at the Aspen Institute Socrates Program, Project on Belonging, and Festival of the Diaspora.These international programs offer educational forums and opportunities for leaders to learn from each other, create important partnerships, and equip themselves to promote equitable opportunities and belonging for everyone.Cordell has achieved $6M+ in philanthropic and private support since 2016 and has held leadership roles with the TechTown Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IBM Corporation, and National Alliance for Public Charter SchoolsIn June 2021, President Joe Biden appointed him as Commissioner to the President's Commission on White House Fellowships.During the interview, we discuss:how the concept of belonging defines our approach to DEIhow education can empower democracyhow civil discourse and leadership create transformative outcomeshow tech bridges the gap of underserved communitieshow to create sustainable, inclusive growthGet in touch after the episode:Website: https://www.festivalofthediaspora.orgLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cordellcarteriiInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/cordell_speaksClaim your free gift!We're giving away a one-year membership to the world's #1 business book summary service for leaders! Our gift will help you stay on top of the latest ideas, decide which books to read next, and engage your teams.To get your gift:Leave a rating or review on your favorite listening channel.Take a screenshot of your review.Share the screenshot on LinkedIn, and mention either “Allison Dunn” or “Deliberate Directions” and the “Deliberate Leaders Podcast”.=============Allison DunnExecutive Business CoachDeliberate Directions + Executive Business Coaching + Training Center3003 W Main Street, Suite 110, Boise ID 83702(208) 350-6551Website https://www.deliberatedirections.comLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisondunnPodcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deliberate-leaders-podcast-with-allison-dunn/id1500464675

HSBC Singapore explores the digital transformation of the banking industry and its impact on businesses through its Digital Horizons report. How will the four key trends highlighted in the report drive the bank's future transformation? Priya Kini, head of commercial banking, HSBC Singapore, shares her takeaways with Claressa Monteiro. Synopsis: The Business Times Branded Podcasts; finely curated, intelligent, thought provoking content for decision-makers. Inspired by the newsroom of your trusted partner. Follow on audio apps Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts, or Google Home smart speaker devices. Produced by The Business Times, SPH Media. This episode of Tech in Finance podcast is presented by HSBC Singapore. Highlights: 00:59 Four trends driving change in businesses 03:33 Insights from the Singapore market 06:03 HSBC's role in supporting client's future needs 08:35 HSBC's own digital transformation journey 10:31 Responding to changing client needs More about: International Business Banking | HSBC Singapore Building Smarter Business Together | HSBC Singapore Digital Horizons Report Page Written and hosted by Claressa Monteiro (claremb@sph.com.sg) With Priya Kini, head of commercial banking, HSBC Singapore Edited by: Emily Liu & Claressa Monteiro Produced by: Emily Liu Engineered by: Joann Chai Pei Chieh Executive producer: Claressa Monteiro A podcast by BT Podcasts, The Business Times, SPH Media ---  Follow Tech In Finance podcasts: Channel: bt.sg/btbrpod Apple Podcasts: bt.sg/bpap Spotify: bt.sg/bpsp Google Podcasts: bt.sg/bpgo Website: bt.sg/brpod Feedback to: btpodcasts@sph.com.sg Do note: This podcast is meant to provide general information only. SPH Media accepts no liability for loss arising from any reliance on the podcast or use of third party's products and services. Please consult professional advisors for independent advice.  --- Discover more BT podcast series: BT Money Hacks at: bt.sg/btmoneyhacks BT Mark To Market at: bt.sg/btmark2mkt  WealthBT at: bt.sg/btwealthbt PropertyBT at: bt.sg/btpropertybt BT Market Focus at: bt.sg/btmktfocus BT Podcasts at: bt.sg/pcOM BT Lens On: bt.sg/btlensonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. The second episode discusses the concept of starting new projects as creatives. In our busy lifestyle, how do ideas take off and how do PLOTTER tools complement those exciting projects? The hosts share the 5 methodologies of PLOTTER system, as well as an in-depth discussion about their own successful and failed projects. Finally, the team also shares a sneak peek into exciting items to look forward to at the upcoming California Pen Show 2024. Learn more about PLOTTER at https://plotterusa.com/

Draw Today, Shape Tomorrow. This podcast talks about creativity, system techo, and how to enjoy a creative life balancing digital and analog. Hosted by Job and April from the PLOTTER USA team, we dive into conversations about PLOTTER, our creative tools, behind the scenes about the brand, and creative ideas to help you get started on a fresh page. This first episode introduces the system techo / ring organizer system in the stationery industry, and a little bit about PLOTTER. The hosts share their own ways of using different sizes of PLOTTER Leather Binders for their daily routine. To round out the new year, we explored goal setting and exciting projects! Learn more about PLOTTER at https://plotterusa.com/

Chris Hartley, formerly a law department professor at West Point, retired from active duty after his last assignment there. He is currently serving as a company tactical officer at the Citadel in Charleston, SC, where he finds immense fulfillment in shaping tomorrow's leaders through his role.

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. 

Empathy. Critical thinking skills. People management techniques that reduce friction with fellow employees. These are the kinds of soft skills that American Senior Communities is looking to strengthen with a broad new leadership development program. It goes beyond traditional career ladder and administrator-in-training programs to boost could-be leaders in a range of positions across the Indiana provider's 100-plus facilities. The long-term goal is to build cohorts of workers who can ask tough questions, think deeply about processes and procedures, improve retention and make clinical and operational gains organization-wide. “Any kind of training and learning is gonna strengthen everybody around them,” says ASC Senior Adviser Donna Kelsey. “If we have leaders in the building that are strong and care for people that are independent and make good decisions, of course they have empathy and all those other wonderful things, then everybody's life becomes easier because they're gonna keep their staff.” Listen to this episode hosted by McKnight's Senior Editor Kimberly Marselas to learn how Kelsey is designing the program to encourage new long-term care leaders and “lift all boats.” “We have that 20% of the buildings that are just killing it,” she says. “And then we have that challenged 20 due to location, physical plant, the type of residents … If we can strengthen those bottom 20, the whole company is gonna get better, as they say, with the rising tide.”

So often, a podcast interview opens up whole new areas of discovery and here, food and farm books can help provide additional depth. In fact, the last few episodes opened that curiosity for host Janice Person who jumped on a friend's book recommendation. Now Janice shares recommendations for 10 books in the food and farm space!  The books Janice talks through here are: To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure and Dinner in Your Own Backyard by Tamar Haspel Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food by Pamela Ronald & Raul Adamchak The Wizard & the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C Mann The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World by Amanda Little  The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats by Dan Stone  Cuisine & Empire: Cooking in World History by Rachel Laudan Two books by Edna Lewis -- The Taste of Country Cooking and In Pursuit of Flavor The Complete Food & Nutrition Guide by Roberta Larson Duyff We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy by Natalie Baszile Access links to in-depth reviews, where to purchase, etc at https://groundedbythefarm.com/food-farm-books/

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Carl Chinn MBE Ph.D Carl Chinn, MBA Ph.D. Carl is a social historian with a national profile, a writer, a teacher, an animator, and a public speaker. He was formerly a professor of Community History at the University of Birmingham, and director of Birmingham Lives Project collecting working-class memories as a freelance social historian. He gives history tours of Birmingham and collaborates on local history projects in several schools. He's the author of 34 books, his latest words are Peaky Blinders: The Real Story, the true history of Birmingham's most notorious gangs, which was a Sunday Times number one bestseller. Carl joins me on the Community Safety Podcast to discuss why we should be valuing every young person and finding the challenge for everyone in our community whatever their talents and passions. He shares why we still need a radical transformation of our educational system to allow all young people to find their niche. Carl also discusses his historical interest in gangs in 1900's Birmingham, and his research for the book Peaky Blinders: The Real Story. "It should be local people that are pushing everything forward, not outsiders, ... we've got to start promoting young working-class talents from all the backgrounds in Birmingham." - Carl Chinn Today on The Community Safety Podcast: ● Carl's perspective on growing up in a large storytelling family in Birmingham● Who were the ‘gaffers' of the street in Aston in the 1950s and 1960s and how they were the anchors of the community at the time● How we can appreciate all sorts of skills and work to spotlight non-academic talents● Why we shouldn't be snobbish about academic education● Perceptions about class and accent and why we should look beyond them to see value in people● The truth behind the TV series Peaky Blinders, and why they were not gentleman criminals but vicious thugs● Why it is so critical to provide opportunities for young people to avoid being drawn into crime in the 21st century● Carl's views on how we can eradicate some of the violence on our streets Connect with Carl Chinn: ● Carl Chinn on LinkedIn● Peaky Blinders: The Real Story by Carl ChinnConnect with The Community Safety Podcast:● The Community Safety Podcast Website● The Community Safety Podcast on Facebook● The Community Safety Podcast on Twitter ★

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

In this episode, professor, researcher and author Anthea Roberts joins us to talk about how to view the world and current debates from different lenses. Anthea specializes in public international law, international trade and investment law, global governance and geoeconomics. She is the co-author of ”Six Faces of Globalization: Who Wins, Who Loses And Why It Matters”, selected as one of the best economic books of 2021. In this book Anthea and her co-author identify six main narratives driving debates in the West about the virtues and vices of economic globalization: the old establishment view that globalization benefits everyone (win–win), the pessimistic belief that it threatens us all with pandemics and climate change (lose–lose), along with various rival accounts that focus on specific winners and losers, from China to America's Rust Belt. “Narratives are stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world... They are also stories we tell others to influence their understanding of the world.” Anthea proposes to cut through the complexity to reveal what splits us apart and the points of concurrence that could bond us back together and move forward. In this chapter you will have a bigger picture of what is going on in the world and will learn how to see it from different lenses. You will also discover the importance of being a system thinker and how to become one. If you want to learn about multiperspectivism or how to view the global stage in a non dogmatic way, reading Six Faces of Globalization is a MUST! SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/rhyslindmark JOIN OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/PDAPkhNxrC Who is Anthea Roberts? Anthea is a Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University (ANU) and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. She is the co-author of Six Faces of Globalization, selected as one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Financial Times and Fortune Magazine. Topics: Welcome Anthea Roberts to The Rhys Show!: (00:00:00) About Six Faces of Globalization: (00:01:56) Curiosity about multiperspectivism: (00:06:04) Using metaphors to synthesize narratives: (00:09:05) About identity & how can it fit in as a perspective: (00:17:20) How effective altruism, techno utopianism & self transformation fit in 6 faces of globalization: (00:21:07) Internal chinese narratives about globalization: (00:26:00) Competition & coopetition of how narratives succeed: (00:34:31) How to be good at system thinking: (00:42:05) Overrated & underrated questions: (00:46:11) Wrap-up: (00:48:20) Mentioned resources: “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World” book by Charles C. Mann “Images of Organization” Book by Gareth Morgan “Metaphors we believe by” (Blog) by Aaron Z. Lewis Connect with Anthea Roberts: Web: https://www.anthearoberts.com/ Six Faces of Globalization Web: https://www.sixfacesofglobalization.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthea-roberts-a8596b142/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AntheaERoberts Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLoW2GdYY2EHQVLUNYoI74g/playlists

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.

It's the first time on the WAA show we get to welcome two guests: Nina Wöss and Lisa-Marie Fassl. Both have extensive background in the startup scene as investors, founders and advisors. In 2016 they founded Female Founders, Europe's fastest-growing community of entrepreneurial women, where they solve the two biggest pain points in the European tech ecosystem – access to funding for female-led ventures and growing visibility of female talent. We speak about why Austria is gaining reputation as a hub for female start-up founders and how you can lead today in order to shape tomorrow. When you feel like you want to learn more about the show - find us on instagram at @waa.berlin.

In today’s ever-evolving economy, it is crucial for brands to understand and connect with their consumers to drive real benefits, including increased sales and client retention especially as audiences become more unpredictable than ever. Benjamin Soubies, Managing Director, APAC & Japan, Talkwalker shares with us findings from Talkwalker's ‘Shape Tomorrow’ report, detailing conversations around 100 global brands and identifying what consumers expect brands to be working on. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Matthias Hollwich, Founder of HKWN Architecture, has long focused on designing buildings that foster human connection and generate positive emotions and memories. He describes his vision for the office of the future designed to create a more human experience, recognizing the cadence of workers' emotions, tasks, and other needs during the course of their workdays. Matthias explains how these offices will lure people back and support positive and productive experiences and interactions.   KEY TAKEAWAYS   [2:55] Matthias did not originally anticipate being an architect.   [05:00] One of Matthias' high school teachers unwittingly set him on the path to New York.   [8:00] Why Rem Koolhaas is such an inspirational architect for Matthias.   [10:48] Matthias wanted to understand how buildings made people feel.   [13:20] Taking part in a major competition Matthias' team's submission was a surprise last minute combination of ideas.   [15:02] How people connected emotionally with ‘Wendy' their winning submission.   [16:03] Memories are generated by a combination of familiarity, emotions, and novelty.   [18:22] Architects were first to recognize that we need more than just cubicles and conference rooms at the office.   [20:07] How can we lure people back to the office? We don't want to force them back.   [21:48] For Matthias, the future office environment “resorting” comes from three mega trends: hub and spoke, hoteling, and longevity.   [23:45] Matthias just won a competition to create the first ever “work resort' in the world and explains the goal.   [26:22] Typical resorts create experiences. What would the work resort experience be like?   [29:38] How the economics can make creating a work resort effective and affordable.   [32:10] Matthias describes the buildings with personalities that visitors can interact with at the upcoming exhibition in Berlin.   [34:31] People have agency in shaping their living and working environments.   [36:35] Why did Matthias write a book about living smarter as we get older?   [37:55] Matthias recommends visiting an assisted living facility or a nursing home for a day.   [40:00] How do you design buildings with an older person in mind?   [42:15] At each age milestone, do a review of where and how you live and look ahead. How will your environment suit your needs in the future?   [47:45] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: Walk around your local environment, single out a building and consider what you like about it and how you would change it. You are the user, you are in charge!   RESOURCES   Matthias Hollwich on LinkedIn  Matthias Hollwich on Twitter HKWN website HKWN on Instagram Shape Tomorrow Expo on Nov 19  New Aging: Live Smarter Now to Live Better Forever by Matthias Hollwich   QUOTES   “We did not create architecture, we created memories. And that was for me the big paradigm change.”   “If you can create something so emotional that people connect to, it's magic that we can give to people. Suddenly they don't respond to that object anymore, it has a personality.”   “When emotions are involved in your experience, it goes from short-term memory into the long-term memory.”   “Now we can actually design buildings that really make it attractive for people to come there and have an incredible experience, which is about the corporate culture, the community and the experiences.”   “Shape Tomorrow really is an invitation to interact with us as architects, so that people realize they have a lot of power in shaping their own environments.”   “You have to look through the lens of older people, to be able to design things [for them]. So you have to really put yourself into the shoes of an older person.”   “As the user, you're in charge, and you have the right to live in a city that serves you well.”

In this Clever Extra, Amy Devers sits down with Oliver Grabes, Head of Design at legendary design brand Braun. Known for iconic design, innovation, and the unique ability to be both revolutionary and relevant for a century, Braun's focus on simple, easy-to-use design has led the way for functional, elegant, and enduring products. Oliver reflects on Braun's legacy and its future, including their global study with Gen Z - confirming inclusive and sustainable design is what matters most to future generations. Committed to investing in the future of design, Braun is also paving the way for young designers, students, and inventors through the 21st BraunPrize International Design Competition. With a theme of Shape Tomorrow, the BraunPrize aims to support and encourage innovative ideas that address the challenges we face today and in the years to come.Images, links and more from Braun and Oliver Grabes!Many thanks to this episode's sponsors:This year, iconic design company Braun is turning 100! Learn more about Braun's lasting impact of the brand at braun.com. This year, they are once again celebrating emerging designers with their International competition for young designers, inventors, and students. The deadline to enter is September 30th, 2021—so there's still time. For details - Visit braunprize.org to learn more.Clever is a proud member of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit airwavemedia.com to discover more great shows.Please say Hi on social! Twitter, Instagram and Facebook - @CleverPodcast, @amydevers, @designmilkIf you enjoy Clever we could use your support! Please consider leaving a review, making a donation, becoming a sponsor, or introducing us to your friends! We love and appreciate you!Clever is hosted by Amy Devers and produced by 2VDE Media, with editing by Rich Stroffolino, production assistance from Ilana Nevins and Anouchka Stephan, and music by El Ten Eleven.Clever is proudly distributed by Design Milk. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/clever. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

What is the best approach to solving the climate crisis? Should we leverage science and technology to ‘produce’ our way out of the problem? Or aspire to live in Hobbiton and radically reduce our human footprint? Charles C. Mann is the New York Times bestselling author behind 1491, 1493 and The Wizard and the Prophet and a regular correspondent for The Atlantic, WIRED and Science Magazine. Today, Charles joins Ross to discuss the two major schools of thought he identified in the environmental movement—wizards and prophets—and introduce us to the scientists he uses to represent each camp in his book. Charles walks us through the fundamental differences between the two groups, describing their values, blind spots and radically different ways of seeing the world. Listen in for Charles’ insight on a third school of thought that dismisses both wizards and prophets and find out where he falls on the wizard-prophet spectrum in light of the current global health crisis. Connect with Ross Nori Nori on Patreon Email podcast@nori.com Resources 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World Charles on Twitter Norman Borlaug Road to Survival by William Vogt Jared Diamond Naomi Klein Paul Ehrlich Bill McKibben Ted Nordhaus Hans Rosling Jesse Ausubel Ramez Naam Emma Marris Planet of the Humans Nathaneal Johnson in Grist ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by H.P. Lovecraft Dr. Vandana Shiva Adam Smith’s Parable of the Poor Man’s Son Lynn Margulis --- This episode is sponsored by · Deep Sleep Sounds Podcast: The Deep Sleep Sounds podcast is a sleep sounds and white noise podcast. Using high quality, binaural sounds, the Deep Sleep Sounds podcast is designed to help listeners relax their mind and help them drift off to sleep. https://open.spotify.com/show/08OoufgDXbghIZdJsM5dtm?si=-e8OCxo7QSW00JxLJ4CuTg --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/reversingclimatechange/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/reversingclimatechange/support

Regenerative agriculture improves soil health and stores carbon, and there is mounting evidence that it produces healthier, more nutrient-dense food. But our agricultural system is complex and interconnected, and farmers need capital to finance the shift to regenerative practices. So, how can one put investment dollars to work to support this transition?   Koen van Seijen is the host of the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where he talks to pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space about putting money to work to regenerate the soil. Today, Koen joins Ross and Christophe to discuss the many different flavors of financing for regenerative agriculture and explain the distinction between investing in regenerative agriculture and what is sometimes called "regenerative financing" which innovates in terms of deal structure and beyond.   Koen goes on to explore the role of transition finance in the regenerative economy and the danger in overselling the potential for soil to address climate change. Listen in for Koen’s insight around the connection between soil health and nutrient density in food and learn how he thinks about the influence of technology in making the transition to regenerative agriculture.   Key Takeaways   [1:53] What inspired Koen to create the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture podcast Active in impact investing space, discovered potential of ag to be part of climate solution Record conversations to share with investors and entrepreneurial farmers   [5:08] The distinction between investing IN regenerative ag and regenerative finance Can argue that traditional terms NOT regenerative Push for experimentation in ownership structures   [6:49] The role of transition finance in the regenerative economy  Support farmer through transition to regenerative practices Investor and farmer on same side, improve soil health as fast as possible   [9:46] The different flavors of financing for regenerative agriculture Organic transition finance loans Green or transition bonds Blended capital Corporate (e.g.: buy ecosystem services, provide access to market) Crowd lending   [15:49] What role ecosystem services might play in financing regenerative ag Increase as we wake up to benefits of soil for carbon capture and storage Likely to become normal part of transition for farmers   [17:37] The challenges around gaining the trust of farmers Promises of markets, financing not delivered Need all hands on deck to speed up transition   [21:19] The danger in overselling the potential of soil to solve climate change Underestimates job to be done in transition Agriculture part of complex, interconnected systems   [25:03] How to get consumers behind the transition to regenerative ag Research around nutrient density and soil health More funding available in realm of healthcare (food as medicine)   [27:46] Why large food companies are likely to fight the transition to regenerative ag  Removes need for global supply chain as nutrients lost in shipping Doubt campaigns similar (i.e.: tobacco, fossil fuels) to delay   [33:08] The role of technology in the transition to regenerative agriculture Measure carbon storage for ecosystem services Measure soil health and nutrient density Assist landscape designers in deciding what to plant where   [36:34] How Koehn thinks about the wizard and the prophet Use tech to augment, not replace land stewards Leverage tech to scale regenerative practices faster   [45:23] The role of policy in the transition to regenerative agriculture Legacy policy didn’t consider soil health Perverse incentives make change more difficult   Connect with Ross & Christophe    Nori Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori on Patreon Nori Newsletter Email podcast@nori.com  Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food on LinkedIn Investing in Regenerative Agriculture Podcast on SoundCloud Regenerative Agriculture on Patreon Koen on Twitter Koen on Medium Aqua-Spark Toniic Rabo AgriFinance’s Organic Transition Loan Offering The Perennial Fund Carbon Yield Woody Tasch on RCC EP088 Bionutrient Food Association Dan Kittredge on RCC EP063 TeakOrigin Guide Food Research Farmed Smart Sustainable Agriculture Certification Jill Clapperton The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann Ettitude on RCC Bonus #13 Shop Ettitude (with a Nori Discount) 

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

“What if your power in this fight lies not in what you can do as an individual, but in your ability to be part of a collective? What if you broadened your perspective beyond what you can accomplish alone and let yourself see what you could do if you lent your efforts to something bigger? Yes, it’s true that you can’t solve the climate crisis alone, but it’s even more true that we can’t solve it without you. It’s a team sport.” —Mary AnnaÏse Heglar   When Wired Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Thompson’s kids asked him what they should learn to do to save the planet, he brought the question to his team at the magazine. And they responded with an entire issue devoted to climate solutions.   Maria Streshinsky is the Executive Editor of Wired, a science and technology magazine devoted to exploring technology’s potential to shape the world for the better. On this bonus episode of Reversing Climate Change, Maria joins Ross to discuss the forthcoming issue of Wired, walking us through its sections on carbon capture, food and land, transportation and renewable energy.   Maria describes the magazine’s positioning as techno-optimists, explaining their decision to focus on the technology we have today that can make the biggest impact in the next ten years. Listen in for Maria’s insight on how the magazine addresses both big picture infrastructure and individual responsibility for climate solutions and learn how you can access this special climate issue of Wired.   Key Takeaways   [1:11] Why Wired devoted an entire issue to climate solutions See climate as Earth’s greatest existential problem Explore how tech can shape future in healthy way    [3:52] The magazine’s positioning as techno-optimists  Highlight technology that promotes human flourishing Must use tech to counter problems we have created   [6:38] The wizard vs. prophet dichotomy  Either go back to nature OR ‘technology our way out’ Need both strategies to solve climate change at scale   [9:05] How the Wired team structured its climate issue Big picture infrastructure, personal responsibility Carbon capture, food + land, transportation and renewable energy   [14:42] The careful optimism that characterizes the issue Highlights diverse solutions (no single silver bullet) Promotes application of YOUR skills to address climate Give reason for optimism without being naïve    [19:00] How to access the climate issue of Wired On newsstands as planned March 24, 2020 Online rollout in April (current focus on Coronavirus)   Connect with Ross   Nori Nori on Patreon Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori Newsletter Email hello@nori.com Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   Wired Maria on Twitter The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann 1491: New Revelations of America Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann Brooke Jarvis The Breakthrough Institute Ted Nordhaus on RCC EP100 Norman Borlaug The Green Revolution Lisa Margonelli US Department of Defense Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Mary AnnaÏse Heglar on Twitter  Rivian ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ by Walt Whitman

From December 4-12 2019, the Statutory Meetings of the Red Cross and Red Crescent will bring together Red Cross and Red Crescent leaders from virtually every country in the world, as well as the International Federation, and the ICRC. Collectively known as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, it is the world’s largest and oldest humanitarian network, consisting of 192 National Societies, more than one million members and 14 million volunteers worldwide. Also joining the meetings are States Parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Together they discuss and tackle today’s most pressing humanitarian issues, as well as set the future direction of the Movement. In this episode of the podcast, we have Celine Leonet, ICRC’s Cooperation Delegate in Washington. We discuss the history of the meetings, some of the themes to be addressed there—including the future of International Humanitarian Law, the humanitarian consequences of climate shocks and hazards, and the impact of declining trust on humanitarian action—and why it all matters. Hosted by Niki Clark and Will Pons.

Farmers use poetry to make decisions, leveraging their deep connection with the land and the wisdom passed down from previous generations. Academics use science to make decisions, leveraging technology to innovate in the land management space. What if we recognized the value in both decision-making processes? What if we respected the farmers’ intuition, yet supported their efforts with tools from science to promote conservation?   Hannah Birge is the Director of Water and Agriculture and Nelson Winkel is the Platte River Prairies Assistant Preserve Manager and Soil Health Specialist with The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Hannah and Nelson join Ryan and Christophe to discuss the conservation practices farmers are adopting in the Great Plains and explain how The Nature Conservancy supports them with funding, technical support and labor.   Hannah shares her approach to communicating with farmers, discussing the language she uses to navigate differences among stakeholders, and Nelson speaks to the relationship of trust their team works to build with skeptical farmers. Listen in for insight around scaling conservation through farmer-to-farmer learning and find out how The Nature Conservancy is putting theory into practice by helping farmers reduce tillage and leverage precision nutrition management, fertigation and cover crops.   Key Takeaways   [1:18] Hannah’s path to reversing climate change Grew up working on dairy farms in rural Vermont Conceptual world of soil carbon, ecosystem management Blend academic ideas with practical on-the-ground action   [4:57] Nelson’s path to reversing climate change Grew up on small organic dairy farm in Wisconsin Large-scale restoration work on diverse cropland   [6:50] What conservation practices farmers are using No-till practices widespread Pockets of precision nutrition management + cover crops   [8:30] Hannah’s approach to communicating with farmers Ask open-ended questions and LISTEN Remove barriers to implement conservation practices   [12:25] The concept of farmer-to-farmer learning Nature Conservancy projects create built-in peer network Target middle-of-the-road farmers to be ambassadors   [13:52] How to get farmers to adopt conservation practices long term Difficult decision in light of razor-thin margins See results ‘through truck window’   [18:06] The ex-ante issue around paying farmers for conservation Only get paid for what already did, need money to start Need prototypes on working farms   [22:19] The Nature Conservancy’s role in working with stakeholders Projects to reduce tillage, incorporate fertigation, etc. Relationship management among disparate interests   [25:43] Hannah’s vision for the future of agriculture  Farmers rewarded for conservation Soil health practices on every acre Tech for irrigation efficiency, nutrition management   [27:47] Hannah’s argument against absolutes Many different pathways to achieve vision Can’t confront values with facts Creatively navigate differences (benefits to both sides)   [32:42] How The Nature Conservancy wins over skeptical farmers Develop relationship of trust Common ground (everyone wants clean water, fresh air)   [35:41] What people don’t know about farmers Incredible technical ability + brilliant economists Manage people/equipment, think on fly and plan ahead   Connect with Ryan & Christophe    Nori Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori Newsletter Email hello@nori.com Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska The Land Institute Rick Clark Wendell Berry The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann Benji Backer on RCC EP074 Clay Govier

John Zinner, LEED Fellow, is Principal of Zinner Consultants,having founded the firm in 1990. He brings clients a broad sustainability and environmental perspective as well as experience in policy development, project and program planning, and project management. John has developed and managed groundbreaking sustainable development and environmental mitigation programs for, among others, Playa Vista, Whole Foods, Boeing Corporation and the City of Rancho Cucamonga. His leadership has been recognized through numerous awards, he has lectured nationwide before professional, university and public audiences, and he has been interviewed on Good Morning America. In acknowledgment of John's contributions to the field of green building and sustainability, he was recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council as a Fellow in 2012.   John Zinner - Sustainability Opportunities John was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.  He started his career in policy and program side.  John was involved in solar energy in grad school and has leveraged his experiences to future jobs.  1978 was John's first sustainability project. Prior to founding ZC, John founded and managed the Los Angeles office of an environmental consulting firm, and served as both Energy Coordinator and Planning Advisor for the City of Los Angeles Office of the Mayor. He holds an MA in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Southern California, and a BA in Political Science from The Colorado College. "I was asked to lead a charge to write a residential sustainability guideline for over 5,000 residential units in 1978 and LEED was in pilot." – John Zinner   1970 Challenges Early challenges in the 1970's centered around education.  On the Playa Vista project, workshops were held but everyone wanted to know what they really had to do and that is how guidelines were developed. "Playa Vista is a project that I am still involved in and have a lot of support." – John Zinner   Mentors John recognizes Dave Peterson a grad school professor was a mentor that stood out.  He was involved in the solar energy lab and was the one who got it started. We were all excited about getting involved at the ground floor as something new.   LEED Movement One of the first LEED projects for John was the first Platinum Museum.  There were a enough developers doing LEED core and shell that it spiked the interest for others to join in for market purposes. "It was an interesting voyage.  Some developers were eyeing it, not quite sure what to do with it.  A lot of the early push came out of the local government." – John Zinner   Pro-Tips/Routines/Rituals "Having a good staff, focusing on where my skills are best and letting my staff do the technical side of LEED including documentation and I am more focused on client relations and strategic opportunities.  I think knowing who you are, knowing what you are good at and knowing what you're not good at and surrounding yourself with or joining a team with the skills to fill the holes." – John Zinner To hear more about John's journey and his thoughts on LEED, Solar Energy, Sustainability and Carbon download and listen to the episode!   Book Suggestions: The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann   Learn more about John Zinner: LinkedIn Playa Vista Sustainability   Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES: Charlie on LinkedIn Green Building Educational Services GBES on Twitter Connect on LinkedIn Like on Facebook Google+ GBES Pinterest Pins GBES on Instagram   Announcement:  Starting on January 1, 2019, GBMS will begin rolling out it's new membership community.  Members will be given access to some of the guests on the podcasts that you can ask project questions to, if you are preparing for an exam there will be more insurances that you will pass your next exam, you will be given cliff notes if you are a member and so much more. If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on iTunes.  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the Green Building Matters Podcast!   Copyright © 2018 GBES

Brendan Owen oversees technical development and integration of rating systems at USGBC. In this role Brendan collaborates with teams developing LEED, PEER and other rating systems and led the team that established the overarching system goals for LEED v4. He is currently working to integrate this thinking into the other programs USGBC collaborates with.  Brendan is a member of the integration committee working to align Standard 189.1, the IgCC and LEED. He is a board member of the New Buildings Institute and is deputy director of the center for cycling technology at USGBC. Additionally, Brendan is a board member of the foundation USGBC that is partnering to build the William Jefferson Clinton Children's Center in Port au Prince, Haiti. Brendan is a proud Boilermaker, a licensed Professional Engineer and was honored as a LEED Fellow in 2012.   Brendan Owen - Spark of Interest Brendan was born in Alabama and his father was in the Coast Guard.  He bounced around from mostly Great Lakes and Gulf Coast states throughout his childhood. Brendan ended up at Purdue University largely because of the strength of the engineering program. He had little affiliation to the Purdue prior to ending up there. Brendan never considered sustainability a conscious choice, but part of his dad's job in the coast guard was environmental protection under sort of a marine safety heading and a lot of times his dad would end up doing response activities to oil spills or any other type of a disaster at sea.  It was easy for Brendan to sort of understand the environmental ramifications of that type of activity and the responses that were necessary. "I think if there's one, there's one moment Exxon Valdez was the thing that sparked my interest in the idea of being a part of the solutions that could be created from an environmental perspective.  I just wanted to engage in a problem solving way." – Brendan Owen   Mentors The person who had the most profound effect on the trajectory of Brendan's career at USGBC is Malcolm Lewis. Malcolm was the chair of the technical and scientific committee. When Brendan started at USGBC this was the place that they stuck all of the issues that were too hard to deal with.  There was a group of brilliant people that would get together and bang around on the pieces of the technical aspects of the rating system development or generally USGBC policy that were impossible to solve. Malcolm is the right person to lead that group. "Malcolm also work with the steering steering committee and just was a brilliant thinker; sort of introduced the idea of a pragmatic approach to systems engineering that  I think has been something that I've tried to carry throughout the time that I've been involved in the technical development of any other rating systems that USGBC and GBCI are working on." – Brendan Owen   Current Projects Brendan has been spending a lot of time on carbon in all of its forms. They are looking at the embodied carbon of materials and looking at the embodied carbon and water. In addition, they are looking at the embodied carbon of energy and transportation.  They are trying to make sure that they are positioning the rating system to provide incentive for and reward project teams that are taking steps to reduce the carbon footprint of the projects that are being rated. "I'm understanding that the metrics that we care about is something that is so cross cutting and ubiquitous in terms of how you look at issues in terms of building sighting and what you're going to make the building out of in terms of how the building's gonna be oriented on the site as it affects the energy use of the building." – Brendan Owen   Advice "Tell all of us people who have been doing it for the last 15 years to get out of the way." – Brendan Owen To hear more about Brendan's journey, download and listen to the episode!   Book Suggestions: The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann   Learn more about Brendan Owen: LinkedIn   Connect with Charlie Cichetti and GBES: Charlie on LinkedIn Green Building Educational Services GBES on Twitter Connect on LinkedIn Like on Facebook Google+ GBES Pinterest Pins GBES on Instagram   If you truly enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave a positive rating and review on iTunes.  We have prepared more episodes for the upcoming weeks, so come by again next week! Thank you for tuning in to the Green Building Matters Podcast!   Copyright © 2018 GBES

The global population is steadily climbing, and by 2050, scientists expect that 10 billion people will call Earth home. This got science writer Charles Mann wondering: How are we going to feed all of those mouths without completely destroying the planet? Mann explores this question in his new book, “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.” We talk with him about whether innovation, conservation, or some mixture of the two, that will save humanity.

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

The global population is steadily climbing, and by 2050, scientists expect that 10 billion people will call Earth home. This got science writer Charles Mann wondering: How are we going to feed all of those mouths without completely destroying the planet? Mann explores this question in his new book, “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World.” We talk with him about whether innovation, conservation, or some mixture of the two, that will save humanity.

At the beginning of their conversation, Tyler dubs Charles C. Mann a tlamatini, or ‘he who knows things.’ And oh, the things he knows, effortlessly weaving together, history, anthropology, economics, and a half-dozen other disciplines into enthralling writing. And the latest book, *The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World*, is no exception, which Tyler calls one of the best overall frameworks for thinking about environmentalism and the limits to growth. In the course of their chat, Tyler and Charles cover pollution, why the environmental impact of beef might be overstated, what fixed factor might ultimately constrain growth (and if there is one), Jared Diamond and Bjorn Lomberg, the underrated political genius of Cortes, his top tip for appreciating Robert Frost, and why Andrew Jackson didn’t have to be such a jerk. Transcript and links Follow Charles on Twitter Follow Tyler on Twitter More CWT goodness: Facebook Twitter Instagram Email  

Calvary Chapel of El Paso Podcast

Calvary Chapel of El Paso Podcast