Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

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 Vision to Shape Tomorrow's World.

Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.

It's a pleasure to be here.

My first question is, how much of the new world was basically baked into the cake?

Thank you. to shape tomorrow's world.
Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society. It's a pleasure to be here.
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, and they're

going to bring their diseases. And because of disparities in where they would survive,

if the acimoglu theory that you cite is correct, then some of these places were bound to be better, have good institutions. Some of them were bound to have bad institutions.
And because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it maybe 50 years down the line, somebody from Italy does it, what is the contingency here? Well, I think some of it was baked into the cake.
It was pretty clear that sometime people from Eurasia and people from the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? And 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 in the eastern hemisphere.
And that led almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases, diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. And most of the great killers in human history are that kind of disease.
So they're going to meet, there's going to be those kinds of diseases. But, you know, it's possible to imagine, you know, if you wanted to, some, you know, alternative histories.
There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, just does that. It's a great alternative history book.
And he imagines that some of the Vikings came and they actually extended further into North America than they did. And they brought the diseases so that by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different.
And what happened was that they, when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats and went to Europe. And the Inca conquered Europe in this.
And, you know, it's far-fetched, but it does say that even this encounter will happen and the diseases will happen, but it doesn't happen to happen in the way that they did. It's perfectly possible to imagine, again, that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery.
There was a huge debate when this began about whether this was a good idea or not. And you had a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy, sort of asking the Pope, is it OK that we do this? And, you know, you can imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way.
So some of it was, I think, going to happen, I think. But, you know, how exactly it happened is really up to chance and contingency and human agency.

When, I guess in the 15th and 16th century, when the Spanish first arrived,

were the Incas and the Aztecs, were they at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent?

Or was this just where you should have expected that civilization?

Like this is basically how well it would have been functioning on any given time period.

Well, typically – decadent or was this just where you should have expected that civilization like this was basically how well it would have been functioning on any given time period well typically um empires are much more you know sort of jumbly fragile um entities than we we kind of imagine and there's always you know fighting at the top and what cortez was able to do for instance with the with the aztecs, the Triple Alliance, they're better called the Triple Alliance.

Aztec is an invention from the 19th century. And that was three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan.
But their other two guys who remembered this really resented them. They were the superior guys.
And what Cortez was able to do was to foment a civil war within the Aztec empire and to take some of the enemies of the Aztecs and some of the members of the Aztec empire and create an entire new order. And there's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really, I think, emerged into the popular consciousness.
Certainly, it was new, and I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493, because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it, largely Spanish and Mexican scholars, about the conquest within the conquest. And so, the allies of the Spaniards, Tlaxcala, Tlatelco, and so forth, actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of Northern and Southern Mexico and Central America.
And so there is a, you know, a far more complex picture than we realized even, even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published, uh, 14, 1491. So in that sense, yes, but the, also the conquest wasn't as complete as we think, because what happened is Cortes moves in and what he does is he marries, I talk a little bit about this in 1493, he marries his lieutenants into these indigenous things and creating this hybrid nobility that then extends on to the Inca.
Interesting.

And the same thing for the Inca.

It's a very powerful but also unstable empire, and Pizarro has the luck to walk in right after a civil war. And when he does that, right after civil war and massive epidemic, he gets them at a very vulnerable point.
But again, it all would have been impossible. So Pizarro cleverly allies with the losing side or the apparently losing side in the Civil War and is able to sort of create a new rallying point and they attack the winning side.
So he's, you know, so you have, yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fractal societal stuff going on in the leadership. Yeah, yeah.
It does remind me also of, you know, the East India Trading Company. Oh, yeah.
And the Mughal Empire. Yeah.
Exactly. The Mughals, some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his guys in.
And in fact, I was struck by this. I've just been reading this book.
You must've heard of it, The Anarchy by William Dalrymple. I started reading it.
It's amazing. I haven't made that much progress.
Yeah, it's an amazing book. And it's so oddly similar to what happened.
There is this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal Empire. And one side thought, oh, we'll get these foreigners come in and we'll use them.
that turned out to be a big mistake yes what's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy in the sense that uh neil forkerson is a good book on uh the british empire and one thing he points out is that in india the ratio between an actual english civil servant, I mean, you can call them something else maybe, but, and the actual Indian population was, I think, one to three million at the peak of the ratio. And which obviously is only possible if you have cooperation of at least the elites, right? It sounds similar to what you were saying with Cortez marrying his underlings to the nobility.
Yes, there's this thing that I think is not stressed enough in history, which is that often the elites kind of recognize each other. And they join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below.
And that's exactly what happened with the East India Company. And it's exactly what happened with with Spain.
And it's not so much that the you know that there's this amazing efficiency. It's that it's a mutually beneficial arrangement for the for them.
And then Tlaxcala, which is now a Mexican state, wasn't really fully part of, you know, it was, it had its rights.

The people kept their integrity.

They were not part of the Spanish empire.

And it really wasn't really fully part of, you know, it was, it had its rights. The people kept their integrity.
They were not part of the Spanish empire. And it really wasn't part of Mexico until I think it's 1857 or something like that.
It was a good deal for them. And the same thing was true for the Bengalis.
They didn't, they've made out like bandits from the, uh, the elites from the, uh, from the British empire. Yeah.
That's super interesting. Um, Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the New World, in Haiti? Like, why weren't, in many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners is just, you know, it's huge.
So why weren't more of them successful? Well, I guess you would have to say, you know, define successful. You know, Haiti wasn't successful if you meant creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.
I mean, Haiti, partly, you know, to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations was it wasn't is you know in terrible shape whereas there were you know things like Palmares where you had you know for more than 100 years you know people who are self-governing now eventually they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil but you could also point out that there's a great Brazilian sort of, you know, classic like Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to the U.S. is this thing called Osir Toys by a guy named Acuna.
And it's translated, it's an amazing translation, very good translation in English, to Under Rebellion in the Backlands. And what it is about is in the 1880s, the creation of a hybrid state of, you know, runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally from the time of colonialism, And now the new British state, excuse me, new Brazilian state is trying to, you know, take control, and they fight them, you know, to the last person.
And so you had these effectively independent areas, you know, not de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. And there are some in the US too, in the Great Dismal Swamp.
And you hear about those maroon communities in North Carolina. And there are certainly ones in Mexico, where everybody just agreed, these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.
And if they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much.

So, you know, is that successful or not?

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah.

But it seems like these are temporary successes.

How long do nations last?

How long do nations last?

I mean, Genghis Khan, how long did the Khanate last?

It had some impact.

Yeah.

So I know what you mean. I know what you mean.
And basically they had overwhelming odds against them. You know, there is an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence.

And for, you know, the same reason that, you know, rebellions in South Asia were, you know, suppressed with incredible brutality is because it was 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. Right.
It reminds me of James Scott's thing in Against the Grain, where you pointed out there were, if you look at the history of agriculture, there's many examples where people just like choose to run away and live as foragers in the forest. And then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.
Right. And so this, yes, exactly.
This is part of that dynamic. A certain number of people, you know, who wants to be a slave, right? And as many people as possible leave.
And it's easier in some places than others. It's very easy in Brazil.
And so all these, there's 20 million people in the Amazon or, you know, the, in Brazilian Amazon, something like that. And the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery and they're, you know, they're still Brazilians and so forth, but you know, they, they ended up not being slaves.
Yeah. That's's super fascinating what is the explanation for why slavery went from being obviously historically ever-present but also at the particular time it ended being at its peak in terms of value and usefulness what's explanation for like you know Britain bans the slave trade and within like 100 200 years there's basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world.
This is a really good question. And the answer – so the real answer is historians have been arguing about this forever.
I mean not forever, but for decades. And there's a bunch of different explanations.
And the reason I think that it's so hard to pin down is it's kind of so amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and to put red in countries in which slavery was not legal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet.
I mean, it was like the most ancient human institution that there is. the code of hammer rabbi, which I think is still the oldest complete legal code that we, we have about a third of it is about, you know, the rules for, you know, when you can buy, when you can sell, how you can mistreat, how you can't, you know, you know, all that stuff.
It's about a third of it is about buying and selling and working other human beings. Um, and so this thing 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, machinery gets better.
And so the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers who are like the world's best robots. You know, if you, from the point of view the the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and they're 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 in which are run by wage people, wage workers who are, you know, kept in bad conditions but are somewhat have more legal rights, maybe that's a better deal for you.

Another one is that the industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with agricultural labor. And so as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery became less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them.
Another one has to do with the collapse, the beginning collapse of the colonial order. I think that part of it has to do with just a, at least in the West, and I don't know enough about the East, it's just, you know,

to say, but you have the rise of an abolition, a serious abolition movement with people like

Wilberforce and, you know, various Darwin's and so forth. And they're incredibly influential.
And to some extent, I think people started saying, wow, this is really bad. And I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment.
I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement, which are all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don know enough about it to say anything intelligent.
Yeah, yeah. The social aspect of it is really interesting because the things you mentioned about automation and industrialization making silly redundant, obviously by the time, that might have explained why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain, that was before the Industrial Revolution took off.
so that was purely them just taking a huge loss in order because this this movement took hold and the same thing is true for las casas i mean las casas you know in the 1540s sort of comes out of nowhere and uh starts saying hey this is bad and um he is this predecessor of the modern uh human rights movement. And it's absolutely extraordinary figure.
And he is this predecessor of the modern human rights movement and is absolutely extraordinary figure. And he has huge amounts of influence and he causes Spain in the 1540s to pass, you know, the king to pass what they call the new laws, which is says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow.
You know, if it had been enacted to the to the colonial economy in because it all depended on having slaves to work in the mines, the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, and which was, you know, 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 know, you could say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned but still you know this actually happened in the 1540s largely because people like les costas said this is bad you're going to hell you're doing this right i'm i'm super fast uh interested in discussing with you uh once we get into the wizard and the prophet section how movements like for example environmentalism has been hugely affected oh yeah again even though um it probably goes against the the maybe the the naked self interest of many countries so i'm i'm very interested in discussing with you at that point about why these movements have been so influential um but but let me let me continue asking you about the globalization in the new world. So I'm really interested in why you think how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that are separated by tens of thousands that have been independently evolving for tens of thousands of years.
What things turn out to be contingent and what things are both of them end up doing you know what i found really interesting from the book was both of them develop like pyramids right like this structure like who would have thought that just like within our extended phenotype or something but uh 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. I see.
And so pyramids kind of are – and also they're easier to build. As you get a cylinder, you have to have a scaffolding around it, and that gets harder and harder.
Pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one on and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me.
Now, what you make them of is going to be partly determined by what there is. And so in Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a whole lot of stone.
So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and there's going to be, if you want them to stand for a long time, there's certain things you have to do for the structure in which people figure out. Similarly, for the pyramids, you had all this, I guess, you had all this marble around.
So you could make these things with giant slabs of marble, which seems from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universals like that,

and 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.

Yes, I visited Mexico City recently and then I got a beautiful city.

Yeah, the pyramids there. And, you know, what struck me was that, you know, I think I was reading your book at the time or had read your book.
And so if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel. Right.
Obviously, they didn't have domesticated animals.

And so this whole thing, if you think about it, is really the amount of human misery and toil that it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. I don't know, it's like maybe adds a negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.
Sure. But one of the really interesting things about Teotihuacan, and And, you know, again, this is just one of those things that you can only say so much in one book.
And if I was writing the 2000 page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Teotihuacan pretty much starts out as a standard imperial project and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth.
And there's no reason to suppose it was anything other than, you know, like building the pyramids, you know, an awful experience of all. But then something happens to Teotihuacan, and we don't understand why.
After that, more or less, all these new buildings spring up in the next couple hundred 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.
And it's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is. And that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status.
So it looks like, you know, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? They create, you know, something, you know, something much more egalitarian, probably with kings, but, you, but a bunch of good guy kings who aren't interested in elevating themselves so much. Now, it isn't, and there's a whole chapter in the book by David Wengro and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, about this.
And they make this argument that Teotihu, Teotihuacan is, you know, an example that we can look at of an ancient society that was, you know, much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, they, in my view, go a little overboard.
It was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering, you know, much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way starts looking very differently quite quickly.
And you see this lots of times in the in the Americas. In the southwest, you I don't know if you've ever been to like Chaco Canyon or any of those those places.
Can't tell, you should absolutely go. Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because the road's terrible and so forth, but it's totally worth it.
It's an amazing place. And Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible.
It's just really a fantastic thing to see. And there's these enormous structures there in Chaco Canyon that if there were anywhere else, we would call them castles.
They're huge. They have like eight, one of the biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or something, insane number like that.
And, you know, it's clearly an imperial venture. And then we know that it's in this canyon and on one side, getting the good light and good sun is all these huge, there's a whole line of these huge castles.
And on the other side is where, you know, the peons lived. We also know that starting, you know, around 1100, everybody just left.
And then their descendants start the Pueblo, who are this sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. And it looks like a political revolution took place.
And in fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing that, you know, sort of tongue in cheek, but also seriously, that this is the first American revolution. It's, they got rid of this, these guys are kings, you know, or something and, and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice in what went on.
Interesting. But I wonder, I think I got a chance to see the TOT walk-in apartments when I was there.
And I wonder if that, we're just looking at the buildings that survived and the buildings that survived are maybe like better constructed because they were for the, um, for like the, the, the, those were the buildings were the elites.

Right.

And then, so like the, where everybody else lived, it would just might've just washed

away over the years.

So what's happened in the last 20 years is then, you know, basically much more, uh, sophisticated

surveys of, of what, what is there.

I mean, what you're saying is that the, absolutely the right question to ask, you know, are the rich guys that, you know, rich guys the only things that survived and the ordinary people didn't? And you can never be absolutely sure of that. But what they have done is they kind of LIDAR and ground penetrating radar surveys.
And it looks like this sort of more egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. And so it's possible that there's even more really, really poor people with the thing.
But at least you see the, you know, an aggressively large, quote unquote, middle class getting there, which is very, very different than the kind of picture you have of the ancient world in which there's the sun priest or somebody and then all the peasants around there. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
But by the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? Sure. Okay.
If you're not. Okay.
Okay. So the, the, this is sort of a, it's like a sequel or something or offshoot of 1491.
And that book, I'm embarrassed to say it was supposed to end with another chapter. And that chapter is going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up and, you know, I'm, I'm very fond of it.
And apparently I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter, the actual, the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. And I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth.
And it just was awful. And so I just cut it.
And if you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. It's just got at the end, the author sort of goes, Hey, I'm ending, look at how great this is.
And so this has been bothering me for 15 years. And so during the pandemic, you know, when I was stuck at home and like, like so many other people, I hauled out what I, what I had, and I've been saving string and, you know, tossing articles that I came across into a folder.
And I thought, okay, I'm going to write this out more seriously now, 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long.
I thought maybe this could be an ebook. And I showed it to my editor and he said, that is not an ebook.
That's an actual book. So I've taken that chapter and I hope I just haven't padded it.
And it's about the North American West. And the something I've added is thinking about it is, you know, my kids like the West.
And at various times they've said, you know, what would it be like to move out there? Because I'm in Massachusetts where they grew up.

And so I started thinking about what is the West going to be like tomorrow, you know, when I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now. And it seemed to me that we won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there's some things we can know.
It'd be just really a surprise if it isn't, you know, hotter and drier than it is now, or it has been, you know, in the recent past. That would just be really a surprise.
So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. It would be a surprise if it wasn't, you know, all the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of, you know, Latino descent, from the South, so to speak.

There's a whole lot of people will be of, you know, Latino descent, you know, from the south, so to speak.

And there's a whole lot of people from Asia, you know, along the Pacific coast.

So it's going to be a real mixing ground, ethnic mixing ground.

And then there's going to be a center of energy, sort of no matter what happens, you know, whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, you know, hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful because energy is sort of a fundamental industry. And the last thing is, and this is the most iffy of the whole thing, but I'm going to go out on a limb and do this, is say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294, I think, federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue.
And 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. And so then you think, OK, so this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties.
And nature is going to really be in kind of a turmoil. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s.
And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. and sort of says that there is this break point in history when, you know, when people look like me came in and sort of rolled in and they roll in from the east and kind of take over everything.
The West disappears as a separate entity. Native people disappear.
Nature is tamed. And that's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid.
It was in, you know, do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? No. So he's like one of these guys who nobody knows who he is, but it was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas.
He wrote this article in 1893 called The Significance of the Frontier. And it was the thing that established this idea that there is this frontier

moving from east to west. And on this side was, you know, savagery or barbarism.
And on this side

was civilization and tame nature and wilderness and all that. And it goes to the Pacific and then

that's the end of the west. And that's still in the textbooks, you know, in different form.

You know, we don't call native people lurking savages like he did, you know, that sort of stuff. But it's in my kids' textbooks.
If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbooks. It's such a bedrock thing.
I'm saying that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. And there's a wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, who says, you know, to know the past, you first have to understand the future.
And what he means is, I mean, it's funny, right? But what he means is, you know, all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. And a whole lot of history is saying, how did we get here? How did we get

there? And to get that, you have to have an idea of what the there is to do this. And so I'm saying

I'm writing a history of the West with that West, you know, that I talked about in mind. And that

gives you a very different picture. A lot more about, you know, indigenous fire management and

the way the Hohokum survived the drought of the 1200s and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. I love that quote.
Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I mean, let's just stick with that for a second. I'm curious if you think that, okay, so if you 1493 where you talk about these rowdy, adventurous men who way outnumber the woman 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, you have the same kind of frontier spirit uh maybe not the same kind of like physical violence but let's hope it was sociologically yeah sociologically is there any similarity there i think it's funny i hadn't thought about it but so um but it it's certainly funny to to think about so let me do this sort of off the top of my head and then with the idea that if I start saying, if I, with the idea that at the end of it, I can say, wait a minute, 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 kind of had a resilience towards failure.
I mean, it's amazing the number of people in Silicon Valley who have like completely failed at numbers of things and just get up and keep trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. And it's pretty clear and are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves.
So there's a, at least in this sort of shallow comparison, there's some certain similarities. And I don't think this is entirely flattering to either groups.
You know, it is absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia and in northern Mexico, you know, created, you know, to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these sort of cesspools of violence and exploitation that, you know, that were still, whose 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 that I use them every day and I curse them every day.
Right. I'll give you an example.
In my own thing, the internet has made it possible for me to do something like, you Twitter thread and have millions of people 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, I think it's Texas, it's one of the states, that a checks out of the school library, goes into a central state data bank. And they can see and look for patterns of people taking out bad books and this sort of stuff.
And I think like, whoa, that's really bad. That's not so good.
And it's really the same technology that this dissemination and collection of information, vast amounts of information with relative ease. So, right.
All of these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Yeah.
I want to ask you again about the contingency thing, because there's so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think the you talk about how the natives had like different forms of metallurgy.

I think what gold and copper and things like that.

But then they didn't do iron or steel.

And you would think that given the warring nature of these like iron would be such a huge help.

And then there's a clear incentive to build it.

There's like millions of people living here who could have built or developed this technology.

Same with the steel.

I don't know and i i this is like one of those things like I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained and I went out, I walked the dog.
And I'm always amazed that you can there's there's literal, you know, glistening drops of water on the crabgrass. and I you know you pick it up and uh sometimes there's little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass and every now and then if you look carefully you'll see a drop of water in that in one of those holes and it forms a lens right it right and you can look through it and you can see it's not a very powerful lens but you can see it's magnified and you think like how long has there been crabgrass and um you know, or leaves and water? Just forever.
We've had glass forever. How is it that we had to wait to Van Löhrenhoek or whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it.
Or, you know, in the 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's invented in China, you know, thousands of years ago, not around in Europe until the 1400s.
Like, come on, guys, what was it? And so, you know, so there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity that can affect. And one of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact and so forth 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, I mean, the more amazing thing is like in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel.
It was on, you know, child's toys. Why did they develop it? And the best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals.
And a cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply, to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road.
Whereas they did have travois. I'm not sure if I travois, T-R-A-V-O-I-S, which are these things that you hold.
And they have these skids that are shaped like kind of like an upside down V. And you can drag them across rough ground.
You don't need a road for them. And that's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth.
So you look at this and you think like maybe the ultimate labor savings was, I mean, this is 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. And similarly with the steel, I think there's some values involved in that.
I don't know if you've ever seen one of those sword-like things they had in Mesoamerica called macuhuitos. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them, and they are sharp as hell.
You know, they're like, don't run your finger along the edge cause you'll just slice it open. And an obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any, um, uh, you know, iron or, or, or, or steel blade.
Um, and it doesn't rust nice, but it's much more brittle. Yeah.
Right. And so, um, so you say like, okay, they're, they're, the Spaniards are really afraid of them because a single blow from these, these heavy, sharp blades could kill a horse.
I mean, they saw people like whack off the head of a horse with a, you know, big strong guy with a single. So they're really dangerous, but they're not long lasting.
And so part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers and grunts to go and get. It was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige.
And this was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. And so maybe this worked, not having steel, worked better for their values and what they were trying to do in war than it would for Europe's.
I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario in which it's not just blinkered, but an expressive of what those people were trying to do on the basis of their different values but this is hugely speculative there's a wonderful book by ross hessig called um aztec warfare in which he it's an amazing uh book which is like a military history of the aztecs it's it's really quite interesting and he talks about this a little bit and he finally just says we don't know why they they didn't but this worked for them interesting yeah it's kind of similar to when you think about china not developing gunpowder into an actual like ballistic thing or japan giving up the gun actually banning guns um the in during the edo period they they the portuguese introduced guns and the japanese the japanese used them And they said, ah, nope, don't introduced guns and the Japanese used them.

They said, ah, 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, Japan,

and there's this thing where supposedly

under the Edo period,

Japan had the longest period

of any nation ever without a foreign war.

Interesting. Interesting.

I may explain the, yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war

might make you vulnerable in certain ways.

Yeah, that's a depressing thought.

Right. Yeah.

Fukuyama in the end of history, he's obviously arguing that we should just like liberal democracy will be the um kind of the final form of government everywhere but he has this like thing at the end where he's like yeah but maybe we need like a small war every 50 years just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it um uh anyways so i when the epidemic started in the new world surely the ind Indians must have had some story. Maybe it was like a superstitious explanation, but some way of explaining what is happening.
What was it? How did they account for what was that? So you have to remember the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards or the English or Native people had a clear idea of what was going on.
And in fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, you know, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad and you got, you know, and the air was bad and that was malaria, malaria, right? That was an example.
And it's so it was a, you know, and God is in control of the whole business. When the diseases came, there's a line from my distant ancestor, the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who is like, you know, umpteen, umpteen, umpteen.
That's how waspy I am. He's actually my ancestor.
Is about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So he, you know, they see all of this in really religious terms.
And more or less, native people did too. You know, they thought, you know, all over and over again, there is this thing like, we must have done something bad for this to have happened.

And so this is a very powerful, demoralizing thing.

Your gods had either punished you or failed you.

And this is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads.

Because people with their God were coming and they seemed to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God. Um, now both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on, but, uh, but, you know, if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, well, maybe, maybe I should adopt their God.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse.
You know, there's Joseph Tanger'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? No.
Well, not the ones that I've read. And there's two reasons for that.
One is, I mean, it's not really a mystery if you have a society that's epidemiologically naive and, you know, smallpox sweeps in, kills 30% of you, you know, measles kills in, kills a 10% of you. And this all happens in a short period of time.
That's, you know, that's really tough.

I mean, look what COVID killed one, you know, million people in the United States. That's one 330th of the population.
Um, and it wasn't even particularly, you know, the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't, yeah, it wasn't kids.
It was, uh, you know, elderly, uh, people like people like my aunt. You know, so I don't, I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer.
And because, you know, I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous, you know, economic damage and, you know, social conflict and so forth.
Now imagine something that's, you know, 30 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. And that goes to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in ways that you sometimes do.
Like both of them talk about the Maya collapse, but there's 30 million Maya people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards.
The Spaniards are still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. You know, when you go one time, this is now in the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost Mexican province.
And that is where you probably heard about the Comandante Zero and, you know, there's rebellions are going on. And we were looking at some Maya ruins and they're too beautiful and I stayed too long.
We were driving back through the night on these terrible roads and we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. And I was like, oh, God, you know, not only have I, you know, got myself into this, I got my son into this.
And the guy comes and he looks at us and says, who are you? And I say, we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look.
He says, go on. And I said, wait a minute.
You know, the journalist in me takes over and says, well, what do you mean? Just go on.

And he says, we're hunting for Mexicans. And I drive about a mile.
I think, wait a minute. I'm in Mexico.
And those are Maya. You know, all those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards.
So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed

when they have, you know, their Maya radio stations,

their Maya schools,

their people speaking Maya in their home.

It's true they don't have giant castles anymore,

but it's, you know, 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 know, you say, what do you mean barbarians? These guys have it pretty good.
And, you know, if you're an average Maya person, you know, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. And after collapse, you were probably better off.
So all of that, I feel like, is important in this discussion of collapse. And I think it's hard to point to collapses that don't either have very clear exterior causes, um, or are, you know, really collapses of the environment and particularly of the environmental sort that, um, that are pictured in, in books like, uh, diamonds, class, he talks like Easter Island.
Um, and the striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees easter island is this little speck of land um you know in the middle of the ocean dutch guys come there it's the only wood around you know forever they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair uh ship repair and um and they enslaved most of the people um who are living there and we know pretty much what happened there's no mystery about it why did the british government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanction to the virginia company even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and basically like half the people that are going are dying why didn't they just like stop? That's a really good question.

That'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.
um and part of it is uh the the backers of the Virginia company in sort of classic VC style, when things are going bad, they lied about it. And they're burning through their cash.
They did these rosy presentations and they said, it's going to be great. We just need this extra money.
You know, kind of the way that Uber did with, you know, and then there's this tremendous burn rate. And now the company's in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff.
And the cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are van are vanishing um so you know i think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations from over and and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the uh virginia company um a second thing is that um there was this dogged belief um kind of on, you know, inabilities to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. And there's a, I think I reproduced this in 1493.
There's all kinds of maps in Britain

at the time showing this little skinny, you know, Philippines-like islands. And there's a thought

that, you know, you just go up to Chesapeake and you go just a couple hundred miles and you're

going to get to the Pacific and to China. So there's this constant searching for a passage

to China through this thought to be very narrow. And Sir Francis Drake and people like that had

shown that there was a West Coast. And so they thought the whole thing was this, you know, narrow

Thank you. to China through this thought to be very narrow.
And Sir Francis Drake and people like that had shown that there was a West Coast. And so they thought the whole thing was this narrow Panama-like inlet.
So there's this geographical confusion. And 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.
You dig up money in the hills. And there's this longstanding belief there's got to be more of that in the Americas.
And we just need to find out. So there's always that hope.
And finally, there's this kind of imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys without a colony.
And you see that with, you know, later in the 19th century with, you know, Germany becomes a nation. And one of the first things it does is, you know, looks for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed and sets up its own, you know, 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 that you got to have an empire in this weird way that seems very culturally part of this.
And I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you get it, as soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to annex other things.
You see that over and over again all over the world. So that's part of it.
So all those things, I think, contribute to it. This out and out lying, this delusion, and various delusions, plus hubris.
yeah yeah it seems um it seems that the colonial envy has probably today spread to china i've i don't know too much about it but i hear that the silk road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise it just uh but it is this kind of like you have this impulse if you're a nation trying to rise that, you know, I gotta go over there. I gotta go over there.
So what a big guy I am. Yeah, exactly.
Speaking of China and speaking of silver, I want to ask you about the silver trade. So excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up in China, you know, I'm reading this and I'm looking at, you're describing how the Ming dynasty, it, it, it caused too much inflation.
There were people needed a reliable medium of exchange. And then they had to give up real goods from China just in order to get this silver, which is just a medium of exchange.
It's not, it's not creating more apples. Right.
And I was thinking about this. I was like, this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today in the sense, obviously to a much smaller magnitude, but in the sense that you're using up goods, like, I mean, it's a small amount of electricity, all things considered.
But like you're having to use up like real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. And maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake like you can compare to like Ming Dynasty or something.
But what do you think is an analogy basically that there's a similar thing where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium exchange? That's really interesting. The, I mean, on some level, that's the way that money works, right? You know, I go into a store and I, you know, a Starbucks and I buy a coffee and I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it and they, they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper.
So, you know, so that the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. And there's history is, of course, replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money that to us seems very silly, like the cowrie shell or in the island of Yap, you know, where they had giant stones.
And those are money and nobody ever carried them around. You transfer the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something.
So 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.
So that part of it makes sense to me. What the extraordinary thing is that when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly, which is what you're talking about and we're talking about about in, in, in China, where, um, where people got, uh, uh, a medium exchange, but they had to work hugely to, to, to get the money.
I don't have to work hugely to get a dollar bill, right. Uh, to get the dollar bill.
It's, it's not like I'm, you know, cutting down a tree and, uh, you know, smashing the papers to pulp and printing this.

You're right. And 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.
And the Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. And to me, it's absolutely extraordinary.
the degree which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. So a guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants, you know, as part of his idea for climate change.
And to set them up, he wants to set them up in like really weird remote areas. And I was saying, who would be your customers? And he said, Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have like these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits.
And I just thought that is really crazy to, you know, completely upend your life for to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. Right, right.
And so there's a kind of funny aspect to this. And that was partly what was happening in China is that they were – unfortunately, China is very large.
And 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 was definitely weak in the country.

Yeah.

Well, actually, the thing you're talking about, in some sense, El Salvador actually tried it.

They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano, and they were going to use the – I guess the a geothermal from the, from the volcano in order to like make people come there to mine cheap Bitcoin or mine it cheaply. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the profits were more correct or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because you have the introduction of, as you described them in the book, potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and then this drastically increases population.
But then again, it reaches a carrying capacity. So, and then obviously there's other kinds of ecological problems this causes, as you describe in the book.
So is this, you think, at that time, evidence of the wizard worldview that you have this potato and then, you know, population balloons? Or are the profits like, Oh, no, no, the carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually. 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 there's about these sort of two camps that have been around for a long time regarding about how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those

issues. And the wizards, you know, you can call them, that's my name for them.
Stuart Brand calls them druids. And which is, in fact, originally the title was going to be involved the word druid, but my editor said, nobody knows what a druid is.
So I had to change it to wizards. Anyway, you know, 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 we can, you know, we can escape these kind of dilemmas. And the prophets say, no, there's, there's, there's, there's, that natural systems are governed by laws.
And there's an inherent carrying capacity or limits or planetary boundaries, or, you know, there's a bunch of different names for them that say that you can't do more than so much. And so what happened in China is that European crops came over and China's basic, one of China's sort of basic geographical conditions is it's, you know, something like 20% of the Earth's, you know, habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, excuse me, has a, you know, appreciable chunk of the world's surface area, but it only has seven or 8% of the world's above ground freshwater.
There's no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there's only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Huanghe, or Yellow River.
And the main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools. That's rice.
And so there's this paradox, which is how do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water? And if you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. It's okay.
And prophets believe that there's these planetary boundaries. And so in history, these are typically called Malthusian limits after Malthus.
And the, you know, the question is, with the available technology at a certain time, you know, how many people can you feed before there's misery? And the great thing about history and this sort of thing is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops come in is that the potato, the sweet potato and maize corn are the first staple crops that are dry land crops that can be grown in the western half of China,

which is very, very dry and mountainous and has little water. And population soars immediately afterwards.
But so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, it becomes adaptable and China becomes this 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 it provides evidence, if you like, for both sides.
One is it increases human capacity. And the second, unquestionably about it, increases human numbers, increases the possibility.
The second is it leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering. Yeah, that's a thick coin with the two sides.
By the way, so I realize I haven't gone to to the uh all the wizard and prophet questions and there's a lot of them so i certainly have you know uh time i'm enjoying the conversation one of the weird things is that um 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. I just find that amazing.
I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired by the, you know, they should switch roles or something.
So it's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects that I find fascinating. 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.

So one of, I just recently had Will McCaskill on.

He's, okay, so you're familiar.

And then we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history.

And I asked him, you know, like Norman Borlau,

it said that he saved a billion lives.

But then McCaskill pointed out that that, well, that's an exceptional result. He doesn't think the technology is that contingent.
So if Borlau hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about, you know, short wheat stocks anyways. And then so counterfactually in a world where Borlau 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 or what is your response? 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 Swami Nathen, a remarkable Indian scientist who is kind of a step behind him and did much And, you know, at the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable.
I mean, the amount, the insane amount of work and dedication that he did is really hard to imagine. And the fact is that he was going against many of the breeding, plant breeding dogmas of his day.
That all matters in his insistence on feeding the poor. So he did remarkable things.
Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered. 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 and the discovery of antibiotics and so forth was leading to a real population rise. And the amount of human misery that would have occurred is really frightening to think about.
So in some sense, I think he's right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.
Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the Green Revolution right after, like if the actual implementation of these different strains in Pakistan and India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the government there are just like totally won over by the profits and they decide not to implant this technology at all.
If you think about what happened to nuclear in the 70s in many different countries, right?

Maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution.

So it's important to beat the profit.

Maybe that's not the correct way to say it, but one way you could put it is it's important to beat the profits.

Before the policies are passed, you have to get the technology in there.

You're right.

Or else you want to listen to the, know in my opinion this is just my personal opinion you want to listen to the profits about what the problems are they're incredible about diagnosing uh problems and very frequently they're right um about those things there's the social issues about the green revolution dead right they're completely right i don't know if you um then adopt their solutions um it's a little bit like my feeling with my editors my editors often will point out problems i almost never agree with their solution but they're correct about the diagnoses um you know the the fact is that borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India,

but it was also a fact that 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 of this book was when I went to Tamil Nadu

and 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. I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew they really grasped that they really had done that.
By the way, a person for you to interview is, there's a, yes, it's Marcy Baranski, excuse me, M-B-A-R-A-N-S-K-I, and she's got a green, book about the history of the Green Revolution. Interesting.
Yeah, she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it.
So here's a plug for her. So if we apply that particular story to today, I mean, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that are as powerful.
We're as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that the green, like these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? Like if you just back test our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or would have taken way too long or something? It's possible.
I mean, you know, bureaucracies can always go, can always go rogue. And government is faced with this kind of impossible problem.
So like, let us take, for example, there's a current big political argument about whether the former president Trump should have taken these documents, you know, top secret documents to to his house in Florida and done whatever you want to. And let us say just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret documents and should not have been in a basement.
Let's just say that's true. But we don't have, and he says, well, whatever the president says is declassified is declassified.
And let us say that's true. I mean, I don't know.
I'm just talking about it as a paper. Obviously, that would be bad.
You would not want to have that kind of informal process if, or you can imagine all kinds of things that you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place so then the um but nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty um in that scenario and uh you so then you say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassifying and immediately you add more you know delay 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 government, which is that people occasionally do things you would never imagine as, you know, completely screwy.
And so then you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that, and that impedes everybody else. And so in the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30s when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfanamide that killed hundreds of people.
It was a flat-out poison. And hundreds of people died.
You think, like, who would do that? But somebody did that. And they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay.
And then something with thalidomide, you know, which they did stop here because, you know, the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem.
So I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by government here, in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. And, you know, it's kind of like this, I was phrasing it crudely, but I think you see the kind of trade-off.
So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? And so I would argue that sometimes it's well-managed and sometimes it's not. Like, it's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, you know, in record time.
And they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews. And they 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, and 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, they've done, especially for the chestnuts, extraordinary efforts to test. And I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come.
So I just feel there's this great problem in the flaws that you identify. I would like to back off and say this is a problem sort of inherent to government.
And, you know, that there is always, you know, they're always protecting us against the edge case. And the edge case sets the rules.
And that ends up, you know, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else. Yeah.
And the vaccines are an interesting example here because one of the things you talk about in the book, one of the possibilities with regards to climate change is that you could have some kind of geoengineering. And I think you mentioned in the book that, well, as long as it could just be like if even one country tries this, then they can effectively for relatively modest amount of money, they could change the atmosphere.

But then I look at the failure of any government to approve human challenge trials. Yes.
Something that seems like an obvious thing to do and would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. And then I wonder, maybe the collaboration among,

the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering

actually couldn't happen

because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.

So let me give a plug here for a fun novel

by my friend, Neil Stevenson, called Termination Shock,

which is about some rich person just doing it,

just doing geoengineering. And the fact that it's actually not 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. And 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's way, way too slow. People who are, you know, super anxious, uh, about moral hazard and the precautionary principle would say that's way, way too fast.
So you have these different, um, uh, constituencies. So it's, 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.
10 years is not – I don't mean to imply that that's nothing, but really killing off something. Is there an example if you can think of a thing that was killed off? Nuclear? It's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise.

Like a lot of people say maybe it was just bound to be at this date.

But I think in that case, that was a very successful case of.

You know, as far as I can tell, of regulatory capture in which the opponents of the of of the technology successfully created this crazy... So one of the weird things about nuclear stuff, this is not actually in the book.
I actually wrote a whole long section about it in the book, and I cut it out because it felt like it was just too much in the weeds. If you have a coal plant, they have environmental rules.
And the rules are based on a threshold principle, that you set a safe threshold for the emission of particulates and other things. And as long as you're below that threshold, you're fine.
Nuclear power has a thing for its main type of, you know, quote, pollution, which is radiation. It's called the linear no-threshold model.
And what it says is that you have to reduce radiation to the maximum extent practicable. You know, and that is set by essentially, you know, if your nuclear power is way cheaper than coal power, which it is, that means you have more profits so that you can spend more money on reducing it.
And so you're going ever further on the road to diminishing returns. So you have a completely different regulatory standard for nuclear, I'm talking about this country, than you do for coal.
And so you have this bizarre fact that coal power plants emit more radiation than nuclear plant plants do because of the residual radiation in the coal is dug up from underneath the earth and so there you have um you know a case of um you know a very strange case of regulatory capture in which you have a completely inconsistent set of safety standards you know across different parts of the same industry. And the question to me, sort of an empirical question, is how common is that? Or is that this weird thing that's happened to nuclear? Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so assume that you're, let's say you're in the 1960s, and that you are a philanthropic donor who is interested, let's say you're like the 1960s version of an effective altruist.

You're interested in doing the most good possible.

And in retrospect, it's clear that you should have funded Borla.

I mean, counterfactually, he still does it. But let's just say his work depends on your funding.

How could you have identified work like that?

Is there some criteria that is broadly applicable where you could have identified his work in Mexico using it?

That's a really good question. Um, I mean, that's the greatest good for greatest number question.
And to do that, you would have to say, what are the biggest, uh, problems facing the planet? And then presumably if you're William McCaskill or somebody like that, you say all lives are equal. And so what is the thing that's most affecting the most number of lives? In that case, it's probably clean drinking water, right? And I think that's the biggie.
And that means funding primarily urban infrastructure for water and setting up some kind of foundation or some independent agency that's insulated from government to actually keep those water systems going. That would be my answer on that, which would be, that's how you would do it.
I think you'd try to figure out, you know, what are the bare necessities? What's killing more people than anything else? And, uh, in 1960, it's probably food and water. And so, uh, food is actually, uh,

the food and agricultural organization,

once they get interested in boardwalk actually does a pretty good job of

promoting it. And there's the creation of the cigar system.

It can be always used more water is completely neglected. And, um,

actually I would, I would channel it towards water. Interesting.
Okay. I want to know, I'm going to name two trends, and I want to know what you think these two imply for the debate between wizards and profits in the future.
So one of the trends is declining researcher productivity in terms of how many new important advancements each researcher is able to make. There's evidence that shows that that's like exponentially decaying.
I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong that they think.
And the reason is that, you know, in the areas that I'm familiar with, you know, there's two things that are that are that are that are going on. One is like in particle physics.
It's harder and harder to make discoveries because you're a penalty of your own success. You're pushing harder and harder to do things.
And to really get to where you're going, it's just incredibly expensive. So that's a natural phenomenon.
It's not anything really to worry about because, you know want to do? Undo the past 50 years of success in particle physics? People like Murray Gell-Mann could do a huge amount because we didn't know anything. So you're seeing just plain old diminishing returns.
The second thing though, and I think is something to worry, is that it feels like agricultural research. The vast majority of research is in a bunch of narrow areas, wheat, rice, maize, and so forth.
There's all kinds of alternative crops that are hardly looked at and could be really important, particularly in a time of climate change, when we are going to have to have a much more resilient and varied agricultural system to deal with the uncertainties of climate change. So I'd like to, there's hardly any research done in agroforestry.
All those crops are essentially wild. You know, how many people are, you know, except for William Powell looking at chestnut, there's practically no real genetic research into increasing tree crop productivity.
There's also not nearly enough research in even, you know, things like cassava, where you could, you know, do a huge amount because there's just, I always tell, when I talk to people, I always say, go to these other crops. They're really, really important.
They're going to be even more important in the future. And there's virtually no research on them.
And you can make giant strides rather than being the person who's trying to increasingly optimize wheat, something that's already been optimized by 10,000 people. So part of it is that there is this channeling of people into fields that are already well-trodden.
And I think that you can see that in many, many areas of research. That would be a partial answer to that question.
I see. Yeah.
So I was going to ask, um, if there's declining research productivity, maybe there's less,

uh, would be a partial answer to that question. I see.
Yeah. So I was going to ask if there's declining research productivity, maybe there's less rabbits who can just keep pulling out of the hat like Burla did.
But let me just ask instead, or similarly, with regards to increasing the productivity of trees in order to potentially deal with climate change, what in the book you speculate about C4 photosynthesis, you know. That's just an example of the kind of thing that you couldn't do.
What is the status of that? Are you optimistic about that? Yeah, they're plugging away. It's a huge, difficult problem, but it's extraordinarily interesting.
And to get something like C4 rice would be just an absolutely gigantic increase in productivity. But even in drylands areas, there's this method of agriculture that's used in West Africa and places like northern Mexico, which is silvopastoral, where you have ruminants, cows and so forth, and trees.
And to create a system that is way easier on the land, uses way less water, and is almost as productive as annual crops. And almost no research has gone into that.
You know, that would be another example of a kind of thing that you could do that I would argue, you know, would have a much greater impact than the person trying to get the latest flavor of cherry flavor nose drops or something,

which is what a huge amount of research is in.

There have been people speculating recently that environmental contaminants are leading to a host of bad outcomes in health in the West,

especially obesity. How plausible do you think this is?

I guess I always wonder about the mechanism.

What would be the mechanism that these tiny trace amounts of these compounds have in them? And how come as our environment has generally gotten cleaner, obesity has risen? So I'm immediately skeptical of this. One of the issues here is that you're dealing with problems that are on the very limits of our ability to measure them.
You know, you're dealing with, if you're looking for these things, obviously they have very, very long-term effects, whatever they are. How are you going to actually ascertain that? And people who make very strong claims based on effects without a mechanism that are at the very limits of our ability to measure, that just doesn't seem like a good – all that promising to me.
Yeah. It's not impossible.
Not impossible. But the claims you see, I think like how could they possibly know that? Yeah.
So one of these people – they're good friends of mine. Slime old, time old.
they're anonymous bloggers on the internet and they set up um something called the potato diet it was like a four-week study and i thought you might have interesting thoughts on this given the chapters in your book that were dedicated to the humble potato and its impact on uh the world um so basically they only ate potatoes for four weeks and as you talk about in the book potatoes have a bunch of micronutrients that... They're weirdly good for you.
If you're going to do that, use potatoes. Yeah.
Yeah. And then people lost a lot of weight.
So is this something you would have expected? What do you think of this, like, just recapitulating Irish history? Well, the Irish history is both analogous and not analogous because true. They, they ate nothing but it, but also those people were super, you know, vigorously physically exercising because they were out in the fields with really poor, um, tools.
So, um, it's a really different situation from, you know, you and me who, no matter how many times you go to the gym, that's not the same as working for 10 hours in the, in the fields. Um, and, um, also the epidemiological environment is so crazy different.
And all those people in Ireland only live to the age of 40 anyway. So there's a whole host of studies that show that people who take extreme diets, almost always they work.
Nothing but beans, nothing but this, and people lose a lot of weight in the short term. It's really difficult to show that it's possible to keep it off, and it's possible for people to maintain these kinds of diets for long periods of time.
Right, right. I remember that part of the book where you have that passage from Adam Smith, where he's commenting on how all these Irish people, they only eat potatoes, but all of them seem so healthy yeah and beautiful right well they're also on the fields and not in london right adam smith's looking at edinburgh and places like that which are the most unhealthy places on the planet say you have no discount rate so you think future people matter exactly as much as current people yeah um does that shift you more towards the profit side or the wizard side um not not in absolute terms, but like from where you're starting out.
I have to say I'm uncomfortable with this, that in current time reason. This is something William McCaskill talks about.
And I think I don't think from what I've read of his, he takes seriously enough the question that we don't know what those future people will want. You know, there's no question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to people, you know, most people in the 1800s.
So the idea that we can have any other idea other than they probably want to be alive, it seems much more questionable than I think it does. And so there's two ways to look at it.
One is the wizards say, we have an idea, they're going to want to live in this certain kind of utopia and live their longest lives and have the maximum possible physical comfort, which is generally what the wizards say. The prophets might say, and that seems perfectly reasonable to me, but the prophets might say, well, we should be more epistemologically humble, say we don't know what they want to do.
Let's preserve as many options as possible for them. That doesn't seem crazy.
I personally probably leaned more to the wizards on this, but if a prophet said that to me, I wouldn't say, oh, you're wrong. Because that's the same argument about burying nuclear waste, which I also think is very powerful, that we should probably not bury it in some system where it can't be gotten rid of for 10,000 years.
We should just make sure that we can track it for a couple hundred years, and there will be more options for people 200 years from now than there are today. Okay.
So what is wrong with the basic free market objection to the curing capacity arguments which is which goes like okay let's say we do reach the ends of some resource then its price will just increase until you reach some sort of sustainable equilibrium and people just decrease their consumption or keep it constant or something so if it you know let's say with meat people are concerned that the developing world is as it gets richer, people are going to eat more meat. But if it's true that it consumes 10 times the energy and the grain that's just feeding them directly, then that'll be represented in the price.
And then so the trend lines might be mistaken because the price of meat will increase or something. Yeah, no, I think that's a very powerful argument.
But the problem with it, to my mind, is that the kinds of things that we're talking about or we care about for carrying capacity, you know, aren't things like, you know, bubble gum, you know, or things like food, water, energy. And those have never, you know, as far as I know, been governed by anything remotely resembling the free market, right? They aren't today.
They never have been in the past. So it seems to me an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if you truly had a free market for those things.
But it also seems pointless because if I had to bet, I'd bet that it would be the same way it's been for the last couple thousand years and we don't have a free market. And we already have all kinds of weird distortions because of that, from your point of view, the tremendous amount of food that's wasted, the crazy arrangements we have for water in the similar, these ludicrous things.
I have this idea you're in Texas, right? You have this thing where Texas has like its own independent grid. So it can't trade energy with other states that are nearby.
Like, what the heck is that? That's really crazy. And there's, you know, I mean, I don't want me to pick on Texas, but it's just something I was thinking of.
There's equally crazy things all over the place. The impossibility of building long distance high tension lines because, you know, various states have just arbitrarily imposed rules that make it impossible.
There's all kinds of crazy things going on. So the, the, I guess I think like what you're saying is it's very likely to be true in a system that will never exist.
Yeah. Unfortunately,

because it's kind of a nice idea.

Right.

Okay.

That seems an actual note to close on.

This is extra.

I mean, I learned so much from the books and I learned so much from talking to you.

So I really,

I really enjoy this.

The books again,

that we talked about were 1491,

1493,

the wizard and the prophet for, for anybody interested um and then is there any other place that you would like to direct um viewers who might want to check out your work i guess you know stay tuned for the my book about the west which should be coming out next year if i'm at all lucky okay and uh i'd love to have you back on again when it comes out oh sure we can talk about can talk about the Texas has got an amazing history. Yeah, definitely.
Definitely. One of the things I learned about was the Comanche.
Ross Custor's. And their role in Texas history is just totally eye-poppingly amazing.
So that's actually a very fun part. So we can talk about your Texas roots.
We definitely will. Thanks so much for coming on, Charles.
Sure. Pleasure.
Nice to meet you. Hey, thanks for listening.
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