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One of the weird things is that um about podcasts is that as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer that is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream uh journalist um interviewer to head.
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I I just find that amazing.
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I don't don't understand it.
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So, I think you guys should be hired by the uh you know, they should switch roles or something. Yes.
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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 uh they they they join up um in arrangements that increase both of their power and you know exploit the uh the poor schmucks down below.
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And that's exactly what happened in with the East India Company and it's exactly what happened with with with Spain.
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Science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas.
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you turn on the science machine essentially and we can you know we can escape these kind of um dilemmas and the prophets say no that there's there's that that natural systems are governed by um laws um and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limits or planetary boundaries. Okay.
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Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Man, 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.
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Two remarkable scientists and their dueling vision to shape tomorrow's world.
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Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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My first question is, how much of the new world was basically baked into the cake?
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So at some point people from Eurasia were going to travel to the new world and they were going to bring their diseases and at you know because of disparities in where they would survive.
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If the asmoglu theory that you site is correct then at 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 um African slaves.
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So how much of this was just bound to happen if if Columbus hadn't done it maybe 50 years down the line somebody from you know Italy does it like what is the contingency here?
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Well I think some of it was baked into the cake.
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It was pretty clear that you know sometime people from Eurasia and people from the western hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other.
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I mean how could that not happen right?
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And there was a huge epi ep epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres.
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Um largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history there were many more domesticable animals um in Eurasia in the eastern hemisphere and that led almost inevitably to the creation of zonotic diseases.
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Diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases.
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And most of the great killers um in human history are that kind of disease.
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So they're going to meet.
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there's going to be those kinds of um diseases.
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But, you know, it's possible to uh imagine, you know, if you wanted to some, you know, alternative histories, there's a wonderful um uh book by Laurent Bin uh called Civilizations that in fact just does that.
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It's a great alternative history uh book and he imagines that some of the Vikings came and they actually extended further into um North America and they did and they brought the diseases so that by the time of Columbus and so forth the epidemiological balance was different.
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Um and what happened was that they uh when Columbus and those guys came these uh societies killed him, grabbed his boats and went to and went to Europe and the Inca conquer Europe in this and you know it's it's it's far-fetched but it does say that that even this encounter will happen and the diseases will happen but it doesn't have to happen in the way that they that they did.
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You know, it's perfectly possible to imagine again that uh Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery.
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Uh there was a huge debate, you know, when this began about whether this was a good idea or not.
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And uh you had a lot of uh reservations uh particularly among the uh the Catholic monarchy uh sort of asking the pope, is it okay that we do this?
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And uh you know you can imagine the the penny uh dropping in in a in in a slightly different way.
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Uh so some of it was I think going to happen I think uh but but you know how exactly it happened is is really up to chance and contingency and human agency.
4:30
Uh when I guess in the 15th and 16th century when um 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?
4:47
Like this is basically how well it would have been functioning on any given time period.
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Well, typically um empires are much more, you know, sort of jumbly, fragile, um entities than we we we kind of imagine.
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And there's always, you know, fighting at the top.
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And what Cortez was able to do, for instance, with the with the Aztecs, the triple alliance, the trip, they're better called the triple alliance.
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Aztec is a invention from the 19th century.
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Um, and that was three uh groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica who had the great city of Tinoan.
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But their other two guys who are remembered this really resented them.
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They were the, you know, superior guys.
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And what Cortez was able to do was to fment a civil war within the Aztec um empire and uh uh 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.
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And there's a fascinating set of um history that hasn't really uh I think emerged into the popular consciousness.
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Certainly, it was new and I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it wasn't uh it was it was so new that I didn't know anything about it largely Spanish and me and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest.
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And so the allies of the Spaniards um talaglan telco and so forth actually sent armies out and conquered big swats of northern and southern Mexico and c and and central America.
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And so there is a you know a far more complex uh picture than we realized even even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published uh 14 1491. So in that sense, yes.
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But the also the conquest wasn't as complete as we as we think because what happened is Cortez moves in and what he does is he marries I talk a little bit about this in 1493.
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He marries his lieutenants into these um you know these these indigenous things and creating this hybrid uh nobility that then extends on to the to the Inca. So interesting.
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And the same thing for the Inca.
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It's a it's a very powerful but also unstable empire.
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And Pizaro has the luck to walk in right after a civil war.
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And uh when and when he does that and right after civil war and massive epidemic, he gets them at a at a very vulnerable point.
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But again, it all would have been impossible.
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Pizarro cleverly uh allies with the losing side or the apparently losing side in this in in the civil war and is able to um sort of create a new rallying point and they attack the the winning side.
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So he's, you know, so you have, yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points um because of fractal recital stuff going on in the in the leadership. Yeah. Yeah.
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It does remind me also of you know the East India Trading Company and Oh yeah. And the Mughal Empire. Yes.
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The Mugals, some of those guys in Bengal invited uh Clive and his guys in.
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And in fact, I was struck by this uh I've just been reading this uh book.
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You must maybe you've heard of it.
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The Anarchy by William Del Rimple.
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I've started reading it but I haven't made that much progress.
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Yeah, it's an amazing uh book and it's so oddly similar to what happened.
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There's 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 and that turned out to be a big mistake. Yes.
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Yes. What what's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy in the sense that uh Neil Ferguson has 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
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you can call them what something else maybe but and the actual Indian population was I think 1 to 3 million at the peak of the ratio and which obviously is uh only possible if you have cooperation of at least the elites, right? It sounds similar to what you
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It sounds similar to what you were saying with Cortez marrying his underlings to the nobility. Yes.
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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 uh they they they join up um in arrangements that increase both of their power and you know exploit the uh the poor schmucks down below.
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And that's exactly what happened in with the East India Company and it's exactly what happened with with with Spain.
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And it's not so much uh that the you know that there's this amazing efficiency, it's that uh it's a mutually beneficial arrangement for the for the and then Plxcala um which is now a Mexican state wasn't really fully part of you know it was it had its rights.
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The people kept their uh integrity.
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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.
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But it was a good deal for them.
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And the same thing was true for the Bengales.
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They didn't they made out like bandits from the uh the elites did from the uh from the British Empire.
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Yeah, that's super interesting.
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Um why was there only one successful slave revolt in the New World in Haiti?
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like why why didn't why weren't in many of these cases the ratios between slaves and the owners is just you know it's it's it's uh it's huge.
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So why weren't more of them successful?
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Well, I guess you would have to say you know define successful.
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Um you know Haiti wasn't successful for you meant creating a prosperous uh state that would last for a long time.
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that would last for a long time. I mean Haiti uh partly be you know uh to no small um you know extent because of the you know incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations was it was and is you know in in terrible shape um whereas there were um you know
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things like Palm Marius where you had you know for more than a hundred years uh you know people who are self-governing now eventually they were incorporated into um the larger project of of of Brazil But you could also point out that uh there's a great um the great Brazilian sort of you know classic like Moby
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Decker is or or Huckfinn is to the US is this thing uh called um Oshotoys uh by a guy named Dunia and it's it's translated amazing translation very good translation um 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
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and so forth and how they had essentially kept their independence uh and lack of supervision informally uh from the time of colonialism and now the new British state, excuse me, new Brazilian state is trying to, you know, take take control and they fight them, you know, to the last person. And so you
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And so you had these effectively independent areas, you know, not in not uh de facto if not dour um that existed in uh the Americas for a very long time.
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And there are some in the the US too in the great dismal swamp.
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And you hear about those maroon commu communities in North Carolina and uh there is certainly ones in 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.
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So you know is that successful or not? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.
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But it seems like uh these are temporary successes.
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There's uh how long do I remember correctly?
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How long do nations last? I mean that's true. Right. the Genghask Khan.
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How long did the Khanate last?
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It was pretty It had some impact. Yeah.
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So, I I know what you mean. I know what you mean.
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And and they basically they had overwhelming odds against them.
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uh you know the there is a an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence and uh for you know the same reason that uh you know rebellions in um South Asia were you know suppressed with incredible brutality uh is because it was seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire uh colonial order that people um exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile. Right.
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Right. It's it sounds it reminds me of um James Scott's thing in against the grain where he 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
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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 other 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
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And the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery and they're, you know, they're still Brazilians and and so forth, but you know, they they ended up not being slaves.
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Yeah, that's super fascinating.
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What is the explanation for why slavery went from being obviously historically everpresent but also at the particular time it ended being at its peak in terms of value and usefulness.
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What's the explanation for like you know Britain bans the slave trade and within like 100 or 200 years there's basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world.
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This is a really good question and the answer so the the real answer is historians have been arguing about this forever.
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I mean, not forever, but you know, for for for decades.
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And there's a bunch of different explanations.
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And the reason I think that it's um so hard to pin down is it's it's kind of so amazing.
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Um I mean, if you think about it, uh in 1800, you know, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and to put uh red in countries in which slavery was not legal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere in on on the planet.
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I mean it was it was like the most ancient human institution that there is the code of Hamarabi 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.
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Um and so this thing has been going on for a very very long time and then in a century and a half um it's suddenly changes.
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So there's some explanation machinery gets better and so the reason to have people is that you have these um intelligent autonomous uh workers who are like the world's best robots.
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uh you know if you from the point of view of the of the the the owner they're fantastically good except they're incredibly obstreporous and they're con you're you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you.
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So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery or to create a wage uh in which are run by wage people pay wage workers who are um you know kept in bad conditions but are somewhat have uh more legal rights.
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Maybe that's a better deal for you.
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Um, another one is that um the there 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 um economy slavery became less and less important and um it became easier to get rid of them.
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Another one has to do with the you know collapse the beginning collapse of the colonial order.
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I think that uh part of it has to do with um just a in at least in the in the west and I I don't know enough about the east.
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know enough about the east. just you know to to say but you have the rise of an abolition a serious abolition movement with people like Wilburforce and you know various Darwins and and so forth and they're incredibly in in
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influential and to some extent I I think people started saying wow this is really bad and uh I suspect that if you uh looked at um South Asia and and Africa you might see similar things you know having to do with a social uh moment I I I just don't know enough about that. Uh
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Uh I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti- you know cast movement and which are all tangled up in in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent. Yeah. Yeah.
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The the social aspect of it is really interesting because the the things you mentioned about like automation and industrialization making slavery done obviously by the time that that might have explained why it expanded but the its original inception in Britain like that that was before the industrial revolution took off.
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So that was purely them just taking a huge loss in order because this this movement took hold.
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And the same thing is true for Lascasus.
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I mean Lascases 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.
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uh human rights movement. uh and uh 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
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it had been enacted to the uh to the colonial economy in in Spain because they that all depended on having slaves to work in the mines the silver mines in uh the northern half of Mexico and um in uh Bolivia and which was you know the most important part of not only the
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Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire and was all slave labor um 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 it was still you know this actually happened in the 1540s largely because people like Les
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Costa said this is bad you're going to hell you're doing this right I'm I'm super f uh interested in discussing with you uh once we get to the wizard and the prophet section h how movements like for example environmentalism has been hugely affected. Oh yeah again even though um
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Oh yeah again even though um it it probably goes against the the maybe the naked self-interest of many countries.
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So I'm I'm very interested in discussing with you at that point about why these movements have been so influential.
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Um but but let me let me continue asking you about uh the globalization in the new world.
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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 uh that have been independently evolving for tens of thousands of years.
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What things turn out to be contingent and what things are both of them end up doing.
19:31
You know, what I found really interesting from the book was both of them develop like pyramids, right?
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like the structure like who would have thought that just like in within our g extended phenotype or something but uh that's also geometry.
19:42
I mean there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks uh you know in a in a in a stable way and uh pyramids are are are certainly are certainly one of them.
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It's harder to have a very long lasting monument that's a cylinder um and so pyramids kind of are 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.
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pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one on and uh and and so forth.
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So, pyramids seem kind of natural to to to me.
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Now, what you make them of is going to be partly determined by what there is.
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And so, um in Cahokia and uh in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a whole lot of stone.
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Um so, people are going to make these earthen uh 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 and which people figure out.
20:34
Um same way for the pyramids you had all this I guess you didn't you had all this marble around so you could make these uh things with giant slabs of marble which seems uh today from today's perspective incredibly wasteful.
20:44
So you so yeah so you're going to have some things that are universals uh like that and along with the apparently universal uh or near universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Hm. Um, yes.
21:03
I visited Mexico City recently and then I got a chance to um yeah to to the pyramids there.
21:10
Um, 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'm remembering correctly they didn't have the wheel right and obviously they didn't have uh 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.
21:36
Um if I don't know it's like maybe has a negative connotation if if you think about what it took to construct it. Sure.
21:44
Um but you know one of the really interesting things about teocon um 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.
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included this. So teakan pretty much stand starts out as a standard imperial project and they build all these you know huge castles and uh temples and and and so forth and there's no reason to suppose it was anything other than you know like building the pyramids you know
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an awful experience involved but then something happens to uh teatakan we don't understand why after that more or less all these new buildings spring up in the next couple hund 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 um it's
22:28
And um it's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is.
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And that's us that's usually thought to be a reflection of uh of social status.
22:37
So it looks like there you know could there have been a political revolution of of some sort.
22:44
They create you know something a you know something much more egalitarian probably with kings but you know a bunch of good guy kings who are aren't interested in elevating themselves so much. No, it isn't.
22:53
Uh, and there's a whole chapter in uh the book by David Wingro and David Greyber, the dawn of everything about this and there they make this argument that uh that you know technology is uh ti excuse me is um you know an example that we can look at of an ancient society that was you know much more socially egalitarian than we think.
23:19
Um now they in my view go a little overboard.
23:22
it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering you know much of the Maya world at the same time.
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But it is absolutely true that uh something that started out one way starts looking very differently uh quite quickly and you see this lots of times in the in in the Americas um in the southwest um you you I don't know if you've ever been to like Choco Canyon or any of those those places can't tell you you should absolutely go.
23:48
Um, unfortunately it's hard to get there because the the road's terrible and so forth. It's totally worth it.
23:54
It's an amazing place and Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible.
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It's just really a a fantastic thing to see.
24:02
And there's these enormous structures there in Choco Canyon.
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Um that if there were anywhere else we would call them castles. They're huge.
24:09
They have like 8 one of the biggest one PBlo Bonito has like 800 rooms or something insane number like that.
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And um you know it's clearly an imperial venture.
24:18
Um, and then we know that on it's in this canyon and on one side getting the good light and good sun is all these huge is a whole line of these huge castles and on the other side is where you know the peeons lived.
24:28
Um we also know that uh starting you know around 1100 everybody just left uh and then their descendants start the PBLO who are this sort of uh intensely socially um egalitarian uh type of people and it looks like a political revolution um took took place and in fact in the book I'm now writing I'm arguing that uh you know sort of tongue and cheek but also seriously that this is the first American revolution.
24:54
It's uh they got rid of this these these guys or kings, you know, or something and uh and created these very different and much more egalitarian uh societies in which ordinary people had a much larger uh voice in what went on. Interesting.
25:11
Um, but I wonder I think I got a chance to see the Teotu Wakan um, apartments when I was there and I wonder if that the 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 those were the buildings for the elites, right?
25:31
And then so like where everybody else lived it just might have just washed away over the years.
25:36
have 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 the absolutely the right question to ask you know are the rich guys the you know the only things that survived and the
25:51
ordinary people didn't and you can never be absolutely sure that but what they have done is the kind of liar 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 within thing. But at least you see the expan,
26:09
But at least you see the expan, you know, an aggressively large quote unquote middle class uh getting there, which is very very different than the kind of uh 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.
26:25
Um by the way, are is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this mo point? Sure. Totally. Okay. If you're not. Okay. Okay.
26:32
So the the the this is sort of a it's like a sequel or something or offshoot of 1491.
26:36
And that book, um, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter, and that chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up.
26:44
And, you know, uh, I'm I'm very fond of it.
26:46
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.
26:57
And I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. And so, I just cut it.
27:01
And if you carefully um, look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending.
27:05
It's just got at the end the author sort of goes, "Hey, I'm ending.
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Look at how great this is."
27:12
And um so and this has been bothering me for 15 years.
27:15
And so during the pandemic uh you know when I was stuck at home and uh like like so many other people, I I 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, you know, 15 or 20 years later."
27:32
And um and then it was it was pretty long.
27:36
I thought maybe this could be an ebook.
27:39
And I showed it to my editor and he said that is not an ebook. That's an actual book.
27:43
So So I take a chapter and I hope I just haven't patted it.
27:47
Um and it's about the North American West.
27:49
And the the something I've added is uh thinking about it is uh you know uh my my kids like the west and at various times they've they've said you know what would it be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts uh where they they grew up and um so I started thinking about what is the west going to be like tomorrow you know in you know when I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now.
28:12
And it seemed to me that you we won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there's some things we uh can know.
28:20
It'd be just really a surprise if it isn't, you know, hotter and drier than it is now or has been, you know, in the recent past.
28:26
That would just be a really a surprise.
28:28
So, I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that.
28:31
Um it would be a surprise if it wasn't um you know all the projections are that something like 40% of the people um in the area between the the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of um you know Latino descent uh you know from from from the south so to speak.
28:48
Um and there's a whole lot of people um from Asia um you know along the Pacific coast.
28:57
So it's going to be a real mixing ground uh ethnic mixing ground.
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ground uh ethnic mixing ground. Um and then the there's going to be an 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 uh hydroelectric the west is is is it's going to be economically extremely
29:16
powerful because energy is sort of the fund you know 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 uh say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294
29:30
I think uh federally recognized native nations in the in the west is going to continue and uh but that's been going in this very jagged way but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years you know as long as I've been around um it's the overall trend is in a very clear direction and so then you think okay so this west is
29:51
going to be wildly ethnically diverse full of uh competing sovereignties and overlapping uh sovereignties and nature is going to really be in kind of a turmoil Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s and uh the conventional history starts with Louiswis and Clark and so forth. Um and sort of says that
30:06
Um and sort of says that there was this break point in in history uh when you know when people look like me uh came in and sort of rolled in and they roll in from the east and kind of take over everything.
30:17
The west disappears as a separate entity. Native people disappear. Nature's tamed.
30:20
And that's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid.
30:25
It was in, you know, do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Um, no.
30:28
So, he's like one of these guys who nobody knows who he is, but was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas.
30:36
He he uh uh wrote this article in 1893 called the significance of the frontier.
30:42
significance of the frontier. And it was the thing that established this idea that there was 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
30:59
to the Pacific and then that's the end of the west and that's still in the textbooks you know in different form uh you know we don't call native people lurking savages like he did um you know that sort of stuff uh but it's in my kids textbooks if you have kids, if it'll very likely be in their uh textbooks because it's such a bedrock thing. I'm saying that's actually not a
31:20
I'm saying that's actually not a useful way to look at it given what's coming up.
31:23
And uh there's a wonderful Texas writer Bruce Sterling who uh says uh you know to know the past you first have to understand the future.
31:31
And um and what he means is I mean it's funny right?
31:38
right? But 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 to do this and so
31:54
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 uh picture um a lot more about uh you know indigenous fire management and uh the the way the Hokum survived the drought of the 1200s. Um,
32:08
Um, and and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. I love that quote.
32:16
Um, speaking of the frontier, maybe maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I mean, let's just stick with that for a second.
32:24
I I'm curious if you think that Okay, so if you I remember the chapter of 1493 where you talk about, you know, these rowdy, adventurous men who way outnumber the women in these silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause.
32:37
I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to um the technology world or Silicon Valley where you have the same kind of gender ratio, you have the same kind of frontier spirit.
32:49
Uh maybe not the same kind of like physical violence, but let's hope sociologically, yeah, sociologically, is there any similarity there? I think it's funny.
32:58
I hadn't thought about it, but so um but it's certainly funny to to to think about.
33:04
So, let let me do this sort of off the top of my head and then with the idea that if uh if I start saying if I I with the idea that at the end of it, I can say, "Wait a minute, that's ridiculous."
33:14
Um both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose or were oblivious about what they what what what they they they had to lose and kind of had a resilience towards failure.
33:24
I mean, it's amazing the number of people in Silicon Valley who have like completely failed at uh at numbers of things and just get up and keep uh keep keep trying and have a a kind of real obliviousness to uh to to social norms and um it's pretty clear and are very much interested in making a mark and making you know their their fortunes themselves.
33:50
So there's a, you know, at least in, you know, in this sort of shallow comparison, there's a there there's some certain uh similarities.
33:58
And I don't think this is entirely flattering to either groups.
34:00
Um, you know, it is absolutely true that those silver miners in um in in Bolivia and in northern Mexico, you know, created, you know, to a large extent the the modern modern world.
34:13
But it's also true that they created these sort of cesspools of violence and e exploitation that that you know that we're that we're still uh whose consequences we're still living with uh today.
34:25
So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet and I think that's true of of Silicon Valley and it it's it it's its products that I I use them every day and I curse them every day. Right.
34:39
Um I want to go I'll give you an example.
34:42
I give you an example in my own uh thing.
34:44
uh thing. the uh the the internet has made it possible for me to do something like you know have a Twitter thread and have millions of people read it and you know and have a discussion and that's really amazing at the same time yet
34:56
today the Washington Post is uh has a has an article about how every book in I I think it's Texas it's one of the states um uh that that a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state datab bank and um you know and they can see and look for patterns
35:17
of people taking out bad books and uh 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 you know this dissemination and collection of information vast amounts of information with relative ease so right
35:33
all these things you take the bitter with a sweet yeah yeah um 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 um you talk about how the
35:44
I think the um you talk about how the the the natives had like different forms of metallergy.
35:50
I think what um gold and copper and things like that, but then they didn't do iron or steel.
35:55
And you would think that given the waring nature of these tri like iron would be such a huge help.
36:03
Um and then like you there's a clear incentive to build it, there's like millions of people living here who could have built or developed this technology.
36:11
Um, same with the steel, I guess. Sorry. Sorry.
36:13
Same with um same with the wheel.
36:15
Uh, so like what why what is the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with? It just didn't happen.
36:23
I, you know, it's just amazing to me. I don't know.
36:24
And I I I this is like one of those things like I think about all the time.
36:28
Um uh a few weeks ago uh it rained and I went out and I walked the dog and um I'm always amazed that you can uh there's there's literal you know glistening drops of water on the crab grass and I you know you pick it up and uh sometimes there's little holes eaten by insects in the crabrass 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 it it you're right.
36:57
And you can look through it and you can see it's it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see it's magnified and you think like how long has there been crab grass and um you know or leaves and and water just forever and we've had glass forever.
37:10
How is it that we had to wait to van Hook or whoever it was to uh to create lenses? I just don't get it.
37:18
just don't get it. or you know in the book I uh 1491 I mentioned the moldboard plow which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the the soil much more easily invented in China you know thousands of years ago not not around in Europe till the till
37:32
the 1400s like come on guys what was was it and um so you you know so there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity that can that can affect and one of the wonderful things about uh globalization and trade and contact and so forth is that maybe not everybody is is as blind as you and you can you can you can learn from them. I mean that's the most
37:51
I mean that's the most wonderful thing about trade.
37:52
Um so in the case of the wheel I mean the more amazing thing is like in Meso America they had the wheel.
37:59
It was on you know child's toys. Why did they develop it?
38:04
And the best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals.
38:06
Um and a cart then would have to be pulled by people.
38:13
That would imply to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road.
38:17
Whereas they did have travoise, you know, the tr I'm not sure if I trave T r a v o i s, which are these um uh things you hold and they have these skids that are um shaped like kind of like an upside down V and you you they're they're you can drag them across rough ground.
38:34
You don't need a road for them.
38:36
And that's what uh that's that's what like um people um used in um the in the Great Plains and and and and so forth.
38:44
So you look at this and you think like maybe the ultimate sa labor savings was I mean this was good enough and you didn't have to build and maintain these uh roads to make this this work, you know.
38:58
So maybe it was rational or just maybe they were just blinkered.
39:02
I I don't I I I don't know.
39:05
Um, and similarly with a steel, um, I think there's some values involved in that.
39:09
I I don't know if you've ever seen, uh, one of those swordlike things they they had in Meso America called Makotos.
39:16
Um, they're wooden clubs with um, obsidian blades um, on them.
39:21
And they are sharp as hell.
39:24
Um, you know, they're like don't run your finger along the edge because you'll just slice it open.
39:30
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.
39:40
But it's much more brittle. Yeah. Right.
39:42
And so um so you say like okay they're they're in the Spaniards were really afraid of them because a single blow from these these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse.
39:52
I mean they saw people like whack off the head of a horse with a you know big strong guy with a single.
39:58
So they're really dangerous um but they're not long lasting.
40:02
And um so part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in that conflict um in Meso America wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers and you know grunts to to go and get it was a chance for you know soldiers to get individual glory and uh and and prestige.
40:23
And this was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful uh weapons that you you know killed people killed people with.
40:32
And so maybe this worked not having steel worked better for for their values and what they were trying to do in in war than it would have for Europe.
40:42
I mean that's just a guess but you can imagine a scenario in which it's not just blinkered but um an expressive of what those people were trying to do on the basis of their different values.
40:52
But this is hugely speculative.
40:53
There's a wonderful book by Ross Hess called um Aztec warfare in which he it's an amazing uh book which is like a military history of the Aztecs.
41:02
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.
41:11
Yeah, it's 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.
41:20
Um the in during the ado period they this the Portuguese introduced guns and the the Japanese used them and they said ah nope don't want them and they banned them.
41:30
This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s.
41:34
But uh for a long time uh Japan and there's this thing where supposedly uh under the ado period, Japan had the longest uh period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Interesting. Interesting.
41:52
May explain the Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways.
42:00
Um yeah, that's a depressing thought, right? Yeah.
42:04
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.
42:12
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."
42:21
how to deal with it." Um uh anyways so when the epidemic started in the new world surely the Indians must have had some story maybe it was like a superstitious explanation but some way of like explaining what is happening what what what was it like what how do
42:38
they account for what's so you have to remember the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time so neither the Spaniards um or the English or or native people had a clear idea of of what was going on And in fact um both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event you know a religious event. You
42:58
You went into air you know areas that were bad and you got uh you know and the air was bad and that was malaria malaria right that was an example and it so it was a you know and God is in control of of the whole business.
43:12
um when the diseases came there's a line from uh my distant ancestor the um Governor Bradford of um Plymouth Colony who is my you know umpteen umpteen umpteen ground that's how waspy I am he's actually my ancestor um is is uh about how God saw fit to clear the natives for for us.
43:32
So he you know they see all of this in really religious terms and more or less uh native people did too.
43:40
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.
43:48
Uh and so this is a very powerful demoralizing thing.
43:51
um you know your gods had either punished you or failed you and um this was a this this is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads because interesting you know people with their god uh was were coming and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our god.
44:11
Um, now both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on.
44:17
But uh, but you know, if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say think, well, maybe maybe I should adopt their god. Yeah. Yeah. This is fascinating.
44:26
There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse.
44:29
You know, there's um there's Joseph Cher's book, there's Jer Diamond's book.
44:33
Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time? Uh, no.
44:42
um well not the ones that I' I've I've read.
44:43
Um and the reason there's two reasons uh for for that.
44:45
Um one is I mean it's not really a mystery if you have a society that's epidemiologically naive and um you know smallox 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.
45:06
That's you know uh that's really tough.
45:10
I mean, look what co COVID killed one, you know, million people in the United States.
45:14
That's 330th of the population.
45:18
Um, and it it wasn't even particularly, you know, the most economically vital part of the population.
45:22
It wasn't, yeah, wasn't kids.
45:24
It was, you know, elderly, uh, people like my aunt.
45:27
Um, you know, so I don't I I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer.
45:33
Um, and uh, because, you know, I I don't mean it that way.
45:37
uh but it caused enormous you know economic damage and you know social conflict and so forth.
45:44
Now imagine something that's you know 30 or 40 times worse than that and you have no explanation for it at all.
45:51
Um it's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a you know super challenge.
45:56
What's actually uh amazing is the number of uh nations that survived um and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.
46:04
Um and that goes to the second issue which is um that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in ways that you sometimes do.
46:14
Like both of them talk about the Maya collapse but there's 40 no 30 million Maya people still there.
46:19
Um they were uh never really conquered by the the Spaniards.
46:24
The the the Spaniards are still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s.
46:30
um you know when you go one time uh this is in the now in the the uh in the early uh 21st century um I went with uh my son to Chiapas which is the southernmost uh Mexican province and that is where you probably heard about the commandante zero and you know there's rebellions are going on and uh we were looking at some
46:54
Maya ruins and it was they're too beautiful and I stayed too long and we were driving back through the um on these terrible roads and uh we got stopped by uh some of these guys with guns and uh 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
47:12
And the guy comes and he looks at us and says, "Who are you?"
47:14
And I say, "We're American tourists."
47:15
And he just gets looked this disgusted look. He says, "Go on."
47:18
And I I I said, "Wait a minute. You know what?"
47:22
You know, the journalist in me takes over and said, "Well, what do you mean you just go on? Aren't you?"
47:27
and he says, "We're we're we're hunting for Mexicans."
47:28
And I drive about I said, "Wait a minute. I'm in Mexico." And that those are Maya.
47:35
Um you know, all those guys were Maya people still fighting against the uh the the the the Spaniards.
47:44
So, it's kind of funny to say that their their their society collapsed when they have, you know, they're Maya radio stations, they're Maya schools, they're you know, there people speaking Maya in their home. It's true. true.
47:56
They don't have giant castles any anymore, but it's, you know, it's it's odd to think of that as as collapse.
48:02
They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions.
48:06
So, there's this whole aspect of what do you mean collapse?
48:11
Um, and you you see that in um against the grain, the James Scott book, where you know, you say, "What do you mean barbarians?
48:18
These guys have it pretty good."
48:19
And you know if if you're an average Maya person, you know, uh you know, working as a farmer under these uh the the the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great.
48:33
And uh after collapse, you were probably better off.
48:35
So, you know, so all of that I feel like uh is important in in this discussion of collapse.
48:41
And I 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 particularly of the environmental sort that um that are pictured in in books like uh Diamonds Collapse.
49:04
He talks like Easter Island.
49:06
Um and the striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees.
49:09
Easter Island is this little speck of land um you know in the middle of the ocean. Dutch guys come there.
49:15
It's the only wood around you know forever.
49:17
They cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair uh ship repair and um and they enslave most of the people um who are living there.
49:26
I we know pretty much what happened.
49:28
There's no mystery about it.
49:31
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?
49:43
Why didn't they just like stop?
49:46
That that's a really good question.
49:47
That's a super good um question.
49:47
I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer because it was so stupid um for them to keep doing that.
49:54
It was such a loss for so so long.
49:56
Um so you have to say they were thinking not purely economically.
50:04
Um and part of it is uh the the backers of the Virginia company in sort of classic BC style when things were going bad they lied about it and they and they're burning through their cash.
50:18
They did these rosy presentations and they said it's going to be great.
50:22
We just need this extra uh money.
50:25
um you know, kind of the way that Uber did with um you know, and then there's this tremendous burn rate and now the company's in tremendous uh trouble because these it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these uh calves and uh and and do all this stuff and the cheaper prices that made me people like me really happy about it um are vanishing.
50:44
Um so you know I think uh future business studies will uh look at those rosy presentations for mover and and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the uh Virginia company.
50:55
Um a second thing is that um there was this dogged belief um kind of based on um uh you know inabilities to uh understand longitude and uh and and so forth that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are.
51:21
And there's a I think I reproduced this in 1493.
51:24
There's there's all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing this little skinny, you know, Philippines-l like islands.
51:30
And there's a thought that, you know, you just go up the Chesapeake and you go just a couple hundred miles and you're going to get to the Pacific and to to China.
51:37
So, there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this uh thought to be very narrow.
51:44
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 Panamaike uh inlet.
51:51
So there's so there's this geographical uh confusion and um fin and uh and 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.
52:06
You can put it on your ship and bring it back and it's it's just great in every way. It's money essentially.
52:12
They just they you dig up money in the hills.
52:14
And there's this long-standing belief there's got to be more of that and um in in in the Americas and we just need to to find out.
52:23
So there's always that hope and and finally there's this kind of imperial bragging rights.
52:26
Um you know we can't be the only guys without a colony.
52:29
And you you see that with um with you know later in the 19th century with uh you know Germany becomes a nation and one of the first things it does is says you know looks for pieces of Africa that that uh that the rest of Europe hasn't uh hasn't uh uh claimed and and sets up its own you know mini colonial empire.
52:47
So there's this kind of keeping up with the Joneses um aspect.
52:51
Joneses um aspect. it just seems to be sort of deep in the uh European ruling class that that you got to have an empire of you know uh in in this weird way that you know uh seems very culturally part of this and I I guess it's the same for many other places um
53:11
as soon as you get as soon as you feel like you have a state together you want to enex uh other other things uh you see that over and over again all over the world so uh so that's part of it so all those things I think contribute to it this uh out and out lying this delusion and and various delusions plus uh hubris. Yeah. Yeah. I it seems um it seems that Yeah. Yeah.
53:31
I it seems um it seems that the colonial envy has probably today spread to China.
53:36
I I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the silk growth stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise.
53:42
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 got to go I got to go over there. I got to go there.
53:51
You got to go over there. What a big guy I am. Yeah, exactly.
53:54
Speaking of China and speaking of silver, I want to ask you about um the silver trade.
54:00
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 I'm reading this and I'm looking at you're describing how the Ming dynasty it it it caused too much inflation.
54:15
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.
54:26
It's not it's not creating more apples, right?
54:27
Um and I was thinking about this.
54:30
thinking about this. is like um this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today in the sense obviously to a much smaller magnitude but in the sense that um you're using up goods like I mean it's a small amount of electricity all things
54:46
considered but like you're having to use up like um real energy in order to construct this medium exchange and maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of um inflation or some other uh policy mistake like you can compare it to like Ming Dynasty or something. Um, but what do you think is
55:01
Um, but what do you think is this analogy basically that there's a similar thing where real goods are being exchanged for just uh medium exchange?
55:09
That's really interesting.
55:09
The I mean on some level that's the way that money works, right?
55:12
You know, I go into a store and I you know Starbucks and I buy a coffee and I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it and they get they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper.
55:22
So, you know, so that the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing and 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 cowery shell or uh in the the island of Yap, you know, where they had giant stones um and those were money and nobody ever carried them around.
55:43
You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something.
55:49
So, you know, I would get some, you know, coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill.
55:54
Um, so there's a 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.
56:04
Um, so I I so that part of it make uh make makes sense to me.
56:11
What the extraordinary thing is that uh when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly which is what you're talking about and we were talking 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.
56:31
I don't have to work hugely to get a dollar bill right uh to get the dollar bill.
56:39
It's not like I'm, you know, cutting down a tree and, uh, you know, smashing the papers to pulp and, you know, printing the this. Um, you're right. Right.
56:48
And that's what they're kind of doing in in China.
56:49
And that's to a lesser extent, uh, what you're doing in in in Bitcoin.
56:53
So, I hadn't thought about this, but it it and the Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy.
56:59
And um to me it's absolutely uh extraordinary uh the degree to which people are who are bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy.
57:12
So um a guy I know has is is talking about setting up small nuclear plants, you know, is part of his idea for climate change and and he and to set them up, he wants to set them up in like really weird remote areas.
57:28
And I was saying, "Who would be your customers?"
57:29
And he said, "Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have like these pocket nukes to privately supply their um Bitcoin uh habits."
57:38
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. Um Right. Right.
57:53
And so there there's there's a kind of funny aspect to to this and that was partly what was happening in uh in in China is that they were um unfortunately China is a very large and so they were able to send off um all all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes but it was definitely weakened the country. Yeah.
58:14
Well actually the thing you're talking about in some sense it's uh El Salvador actually tried it.
58:19
They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano or they were going to use the I guess a geothermal from the uh from the volcano in order to like make people come there to mine cheap Bitcoin or mine achievely.
58:31
Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct or the wizards more correct for that given time period?
58:38
because you have the introduction of as you describe them in the book potato, corn, mazize, sweet potatoes and then this drastically increases population but then again it reaches a carrying capacity.
58:49
So and then obviously there's other kinds of ecological problems this causes as you describe in the book.
58:54
So I is this um is is is this you think uh at that time uh evidence of the wizard worldview that you had this potato and then you know population balloons or is it are the prophets like oh no no no the carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.
59:10
Okay so let me um interject here uh for those members of your audience who uh don't know what what we're talking about.
59:16
about. I wrote this book the wizard and the prophet and there's about these sort of two camps um 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 um Stuart Bran
59:33
calls them druids um and uh which is in fact originally the title was going to be involve the word druid but they uh my editor said uh nobody knows what a druid is so so I had to change it to wizards anyway um you know say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemas. to turn on the
59:52
environmental dilemas. to turn on the science machine essentially and we can you know we can escape these kind of um dilemmas and the prophets say no that there's there's that that natural systems are governed by um laws um and there's an inherent carrying capacity or
1:00:07
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 um and so what happened in China is that um European crops came over and um China's basic or one of
1:00:21
China's sort of basic uh geographical conditions is it's um 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 um 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
1:00:39
freshwater there's no big giant lakes like we have um in the great great lakes um and there's only a couple of big rivers the Yangzey and the hang or yellow river and the main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools. That's uh you know rice. And so there's That's uh you know rice.
1:00:54
And so there's this paradox which is how do you keep people fed with rice um in a country that has very little water and um you know if you want a shorthand his uh history of China that's it.
1:01:07
history of China that's it. So okay and and prophets believe that there's these planetary um uh boundaries and so um in history these are typically called Malthusian limits after msus and the you know the question is with the available technology at a certain time um you know how many people can you feed before there's misery and the great thing about uh history and this sort of thing is it
1:01:30
provides um evidence for both sides because in the short run what happened when American crops come in is that the potato uh the Sweet potato and maize corn are the first staple crops that are dryland crops that can be grown in the
1:01:46
western half of China which is very very um dry and ha and and mountainous and has uh and has little water and um population soarses uh immediately afterwards but so does social unrest um misery and and and so forth. in the long
1:02:01
misery and and and so forth. in the long run um that it becomes adaptable and um and China becomes this wealthy and power powerful nation in the short run which is not so short it's a couple of centuries it's uh it really causes tremendous chaos and and suffering so
1:02:21
which you know it provides evidence if you like for both sides uh one is it increases human capacity and the second uh unquestionably about it increases human numbers increases possibility the second is it leads to tremendous uh erosion, land degradation, and human suffering. Um yeah, that's that that's a thick coin
1:02:39
Um yeah, that's that that's a thick coin with the two sides.
1:02:42
Um but by the way, so I realize I haven't uh gone to uh all the wizard and profit questions and there's a lot of them.
1:02:50
So I certainly have, you know, uh time.
1:02:52
I'm enjoying the the conversation.
1:02:54
One of the weird things is that um about podcasts is that as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer that is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream uh journalist um interviewer had.
1:03:08
I I just find that amazing.
1:03:10
I don't don't understand it.
1:03:12
So, I think you guys should be hired by the uh you know, they should switch roles or something. Um so, yeah, maybe.
1:03:18
So, it's a pleasure to be asked these interesting u questions about subjects I find fascinating. Oh, no.
1:03:22
It's it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and and to have uh get to ask these questions.
1:03:28
So, so let me ask about the wizard and the prophet.
1:03:30
So, one of I I just recently had Will McKascal on.
1:03:33
recently had Will McKascal on. He's um okay so you're familiar and then we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history and I asked him um you know like Norman Borla it said that he saved a billion lives but then McKascal pointed out that that well that's an
1:03:50
exceptional result um he doesn't think the technology is that contingent so if Borla hadn't existed somebody else would have discovered what he discovered uh about you know the short wheat stocks anyways and then so counterfactually in a world where Borla doesn't exist. It's
1:04:04
It's not like a billion people die.
1:04:06
Maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around.
1:04:10
That's what that was his view.
1:04:12
What would do do you agree or what is your response?
1:04:15
In some to some extent I I agree.
1:04:17
You know it's it's it's very likely that um you know in the absence of of one scientist some other scientist would have uh discovered this.
1:04:30
And I mentioned in the book in fact that there's a guy named Swami Nazan um a remarkable um Indian scientist who is kind of you know a step behind him um you know and and you know did m did much of the same work and you know um at the same time um the individual qualities of Borlo are are really quite remarkable.
1:04:52
really quite remarkable. I mean the the amount uh the insane amount of work and dedication that he that he did um is really hard to imagine and the fact is that um he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding
1:05:09
dogmas of his day that all and uh that all matters in his insistence on um feeding the poor you know there was a that was a so he did re remarkable things yes I think some of those same things would have been discovered would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. Um I mean that would have
1:05:24
Um I mean that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the in in in the interim because at the same time things like um the end of colonialism um and the discovery of antibiotics and so forth has was leading to a real population rise and um the amount of human misery that would have um occurred is really frightening to to to to to think about.
1:05:46
Um, so in some sense I think he's uh he he he's right, but I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people. Yeah.
1:05:56
couple of million people. Yeah. And 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 if the if the actual implementation of these um
1:06:12
the different strains in Pakistan and India if that hadn't been delayed it's it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just like totally won over by the prophets and they're they decide not to um implant this technology at all. If
1:06:24
If you think about like what happened to nuclear in the 70s in many different countries, right?
1:06:29
Like maybe something similar could have happened to um maybe something similar could have happened to the green revolution.
1:06:33
So, right, it's it's important to beat the profit.
1:06:35
Maybe that's not the correct way to say it, but one way you could put it is it's important like to beat the profits like before the policies are passed, you had to like get the technology in there, right?
1:06:45
Or else you want, you know, you want to um listen to the, you know, in my opinion, this is just my personal opinion, you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are.
1:06:55
They're incredible about diagnosing uh problems and very frequently they're right um about those things.
1:06:59
The social issues about the green revolution dead right.
1:07:04
They're completely right.
1:07:04
I don't know if you um then adopt their solutions.
1:07:08
Um it's a little bit like my feeling with my editors.
1:07:11
My editors often will point out problems in manuscript.
1:07:13
I almost never agree with their solution, but they're they're correct about the diagnosis.
1:07:16
Um, you know, the the the fact is that Borlo did develop this um this wheat that came into India, but it's also a fact that it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swami Nathan hadn't um change that wheat to make it more acceptable to um the the the um culture of India.
1:07:37
Um, that was one of the most important parts of for me of this book was was when I went to Tamaladu and I listened to this and I thought, "Oh, I never heard about this part where they they took Mexican wheat and they made it into Indian wheat."
1:07:50
Um, you know, I don't even know if Borlo ever knew they really grasped that they really had done that.
1:07:56
By the way, a person for you to interview is uh there's a Yes, it's Marcy Baransky. Excuse me. M uh B A R ans ki.
1:08:02
and she's got a a green forthcoming book about a the history of the green revolution and interesting. Yeah, she sounds great.
1:08:09
Um I'm really looking forward to reading it.
1:08:11
So here's a plug for her.
1:08:15
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 were as powerful back then as they are now.
1:08:26
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?
1:08:34
Um like if you just um back test our current uh process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or it would have taken way too long or something? It's possible.
1:08:49
I mean you know bureaucracies can always go um it can always uh go rogue and government is faced with this kind of impossible problem.
1:08:57
So like let let us take take for example um there's a there's a current big political argument about um whether the former president uh Trump should have taken these uh documents you know top secret documents to um 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.
1:09:25
Let's just say that's true.
1:09:25
Let's just say that's true. um what we don't have uh and the re and he says well whatever the president says is declassified is de declassified and let us say that's true I mean I I don't know I'm just talking about as a paper um obviously that would be bad you would not want to have that kind of informal process if for you can imagine all kinds
1:09:46
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 uh delay you make things um harder. You add in the problems of um
1:10:07
You add in the problems of um of of um the bureaucrats creating too much power you know all the things that you you do.
1:10:14
So you have this this problem with government which is that people occasionally do things you would never imagine as you know completely screwy.
1:10:23
And so then you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from from from doing that and that impedes everybody else.
1:10:30
And so in the case of the FDA, it was founded um in the 30s when some person um produced this thing called elixir sulfanomide that killed hundreds of people.
1:10:39
It was a flatout poison and um and you know hundreds of people died.
1:10:44
You think like who would do that?
1:10:45
But somebody did that and they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again which introduced delay.
1:10:52
And then something with theomide um you know which they did stop here because uh you know the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of uh check.
1:11:02
So you have this constant um problem.
1:11:05
So I'm sympathetic to um the the the dilemma faced by government here in which you either um let through really bad things done by occasional people or you screw up everything for everybody else.
1:11:17
and you know is kind of like this I I was phrasing it crudely but I think you see the kind of trade-off.
1:11:23
So the question is how well can you manage this trade-off and so I would argue um 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 um 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.
1:11:47
I mean that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?
1:11:50
So that would be the counter example.
1:11:52
You know, you have this new thing that you can um feed people and and and so forth and they they let it through very quickly.
1:12:00
On the other hand, you have um things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, they've done especially for the for the chestnuts, extraordinary efforts to to test.
1:12:13
And I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for uh for for years to come.
1:12:19
So I, you know, I I just feel have this um there's this great problem um in in that that the the flaws that you identify.
1:12:26
I I would like to back off and say this is a problem sort of inherent to government and um you know that uh that there is always you know they're always protecting us against the edge case and the edge case sets the rules and and that ends up um you know unless they're very careful um making it very difficult for everybody else. Yeah.
1:12:47
Um, and the vaccines are 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, right?
1:12:57
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.
1:13:08
Um, but then I look at the failure of any government to approve human challenge trials. Yes.
1:13:16
something that seems like an obvious thing to do and would have um would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during co by speeding up the vaccine approval.
1:13:23
Um and then I wonder may 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.
1:13:34
So, let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend Neil Stevenson uh called Termination Shock, which is about some rich person just do just doing it and just doing geoengineering and um the fact that it's actually not against the law um to fire off rockets into the stratosphere.
1:13:52
In in his case, it's a giant gun that shoots uh shoots shells into the full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere.
1:14:00
Um and I guess the the question is what time scale do you think is appropriate for for um all all all this?
1:14:07
I feel quite confident that there will be um geoengineering trials um within the next 10 years. Uh is that fast enough?
1:14:19
Um you know that's that's a real uh judgment call.
1:14:22
I think people like David Keith and the other advocates uh for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that's way way too slow.
1:14:29
people who are, you know, super anxious about moral hazard and the precautionary principle and say that's way way too fast.
1:14:35
So, you have these different um constituencies.
1:14:37
So, be 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 um in a long lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years.
1:14:52
10 years is not not I don't I don't mean to imply that that's nothing um but uh but really killing off something.
1:15:00
Is there an example if you can think of a of a thing that was nuclear?
1:15:03
Well, it's very dependent on where you think uh where you think it would have been otherwise.
1:15:08
Like a lot of people say maybe it was it was just bound to be the state.
1:15:10
I think in that case um that was a very successful case of um uh you know as far as I can tell of regulatory capture in which um the opponents of the um of of the technology successfully um created uh this crazy so the one of the weird things about nuclear stuff is this isn't this is not actually in the book I actually wrote a whole long section about in the book and cut it out because I felt like it was just too much in the weeds.
1:15:43
Um, if you have um a coal plant, uh, they have environmental rules and the rules are based based on a threshold principle that they you you set a safe threshold for the emission of particullet and you know other other things.
1:15:59
Um, and as long as you're below that threshold, you're fine.
1:16:03
Nuclear power has um a thing for its main type of you know quote pollution which is radiation.
1:16:10
radiation. what is called the linear no threshold model and what it says is that you have to reduce the radiation to the maximum extent practicable you know and that is set by essentially um you know if if your nuclear power is way cheaper than coal power which it is um that
1:16:29
means you have more profit so that you can spend more money on on reducing it and so you're you're you know you're going ever further in the on the road to diminishing return so you have a completely different regulatory standard um for nuclear you I'm talking about this country um than you than you do for coal. And so you have this bizarre fact
1:16:44
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 that's dug up from underneath the earth.
1:16:53
And so there you have um you know a a 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 um parts of the same same industry.
1:17:08
And the question to me and sort of an empirical question is how common is that or is that this weird thing that's happened to nuclear that's happened to nuclear? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
1:17:17
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.
1:17:26
You're interested in doing the most good possible and in retrospect it's clear that you should have funded Borlaw.
1:17:31
I mean counterfactually he still does it but you know let's just say um your his his work depends on your funding.
1:17:37
What like how how could you have identified work like that is that is there some criteria that is broadly applicable where you could have identified his work in Mexico using it?
1:17:48
That's a really good question.
1:17:52
Um, I mean that's a greatest good for greatest number question.
1:17:54
And you to do that you would have to say what are the biggest uh problems facing the the planet and then presumably if you're William Macasco or somebody like that you say all lives are equal and so what is the the thing that's most affecting the most number of lives.
1:18:08
Um in that case it's probably clean drinking water.
1:18:12
Um right I think that's the biggie.
1:18:15
Um and that means um funding um urban in in in for funding primarily urban infrastructure for for for water and setting up um some kind of foundation or some independent agency that's not insulated with that's insulated from government to actually keep those water systems going.
1:18:33
Um that would be my answer on on that.
1:18:36
would be my answer on on that. Uh uh which would be that's how you would do I think you would 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 agriculture organization once they get interested in borlo
1:18:56
actually does a pretty good job of promoting it and there's the creation of the seagar system they could always use more use water is completely neglected and um actually I would I would channel it towards water interesting okay um I want to know I'm going to name two trends and I want to know what you think these two imply for um the debate between wizards and profits in the future. So one of the trends is
1:19:19
So one of the trends is declining researcher productivity in terms of how many new important advancements each researcher is able to make.
1:19:29
There's evidence that shows that over that that's like exponentially decaying. I think that's wrong.
1:19:32
I think that's wrong that that they think and the reason is um that you know in the areas that I'm familiar with you know that there there's two things that are that that that are that are that are going on.
1:19:45
One is like in particle physics um it's harder and harder to make discoveries because the the um the the you're you're you're a penalty of your own success.
1:19:55
You're pushing harder and harder into things and to really get to where you're going is just incredibly expensive.
1:20:01
So so that's a natural phenomenon.
1:20:04
It's not anything really to worry about because you know what do you want to do?
1:20:07
Undo the past 50 years of of success in particle physics.
1:20:11
People like Murray Galman could do a huge amount because there's no there there we didn't know anything.
1:20:16
So you're seeing just plain old diminishing.
1:20:17
The second thing though and I think is is something important is that um in fields like agricultural research the vast majority of research is in a bunch of narrow areas wheat rice you know um mazize and so forth.
1:20:31
There's all kinds of alternative crops that um could be 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 um and uh and varied agricultural system to deal with the uncertainties of of climate change.
1:20:48
So I'd like to there's hardly any research done in agroforestry.
1:20:50
All those um crops are essentially wild.
1:20:52
Um you know how many people are, you know, except for William Powell looking at chestnut, there's practically no real genetic research into um increasing tree crop productivity.
1:21:02
Um there's also not nearly enough research in even, you know, things like cassava um 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.
1:21:15
They're really, really important.
1:21:16
Um they're going to be even more important in the future and there's virtually no research on them.
1:21:21
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.
1:21:28
So, part of it is that there is this uh channeling of people into fields that are already well trodden and I think that you could see that in many many um areas of of of research.
1:21:37
That would be a partial answer to that question. I see. Yeah.
1:21:43
Uh, so I was going to ask um if there's declining research productivity, maybe there's less uh rabbits you can just keep pulling out of the hat like Borla did.
1:21:54
But let me just ask instead or similarly uh with regards to increasing the productivity of um trees in order to potentially deal with climate change.
1:22:03
What is in the book you speculate about C4 um photosynthesis?
1:22:05
You know, that's just an example of the kind of thing that you could do.
1:22:10
What what is the status of that?
1:22:12
Are are you optimistic about that or?
1:22:14
Yeah, they're plugging away.
1:22:15
Um, you know, it's a huge difficult problem, but it's extraordinarily interesting.
1:22:20
Um, and to get something like C4 rice would be just an absolutely gigantic uh, you know, increase in in in in in productivity.
1:22:31
But even in drylands areas um there's this method of agriculture that's used in uh west Africa and places like northern Mexico which is silver pastoral where you have you know ruminants cows and you know and so forth and trees and that the two create a system that is way easier on the land uses way less water and is um almost as productive as uh as annual crops and uh almost no research has has gone into that.
1:22:56
you know, that would be an another example of a kind of of thing that you could do that I would argue, you know, would have much greater impact than um the person trying to get, you know, the the the cherry the latest flavor of cherry flavored nose drops or something, which is what a huge amount of research is in.
1:23:12
Um there have been people speculating recently that environmental contaminants are leading to a host of health bad outcomes in health in the west, especially obesity.
1:23:26
How plausible do you think this is?
1:23:28
Well, I guess um I always wonder about the mechanism.
1:23:30
What would be the what would be the mechanism that these tiny trace amounts of uh these these compounds have in them?
1:23:36
And how come as our environment has generally gotten cleaner, obesity has risen.
1:23:41
So, I'm immediately skeptical uh of this.
1:23:43
One of the issues here is that you're dealing with problems that are on the very limits of our ability to measure them.
1:23:51
um you know, you're dealing with if you're looking for these things, obviously they have very very long-term effects, um whatever they are, um how are you going to actually ascertain that?
1:24:00
Um and people who make very strong claims based on uh uh effects without a mechanism that are at the very limits of our ability to measure, uh that just doesn't seem like a good uh all that promising to me. Yeah. So, it's not impossible.
1:24:16
Not impossible, but but the claims you see, I think like how could they possibly know that? Yeah.
1:24:23
So, one of these people, they're good friends of mine, Slime, Old Time.
1:24:26
They're anonymous bloggers on the internet, and they set up um something called the potato diet.
1:24:30
It was like a four-week study, and I thought you might have interesting thoughts on this given the the chapters in your book that were dedicated to the humble potato and its impact on uh the world.
1:24:38
Um so, basically, they only ate potatoes for four weeks.
1:24:43
And as you talk about in the book, potatoes have a bunch of micronutrients that uh they're weirdly good for you.
1:24:48
If you're going to do that, use potatoes. Yeah. Yeah.
1:24:49
And then people lost a lot of weight.
1:24:52
What So is this something you would have expected?
1:24:57
What what do you think of this?
1:24:57
Like just recapitulating Irish history.
1:24:59
Well, the Irish history is uh is is both analogous and not analogous because it is true.
1:25:06
they they ate nothing but also those people were super you know vigorously physically exercising because they were out in the fields with really poor um tools.
1:25:13
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.
1:25:23
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, right?
1:25:32
So, so um there's a whole host of um studies that show that people who eat take extreme diets almost always they work.
1:25:41
um you know, nothing but beans, nothing but this, and people lose a lot of weight in the in in the short term.
1:25:48
Um it's really difficult to show that that it's possible to keep it off and it's possible for people to maintain these kinds of diets for um long periods of time. Right. Right.
1:25:57
I I 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 they all of them seem so healthy. Yeah. And beautiful, right?
1:26:09
Well, they're also out in the fields and not in London. Right.
1:26:10
Adam Smith's looking at Edinburgh and and place like that which are the most unhealthy places on the planet.
1:26:15
Say you have no discount rate.
1:26:18
So you think future people matter exactly as much as current people. Yeah.
1:26:22
Um does that shift you more towards the profit side or the wizard side?
1:26:24
Um not not in absolute terms but like from where you're starting out.
1:26:28
I have to say um I'm uncomfortable with this that entire time reason.
1:26:32
This is something that William McKascal 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.
1:26:40
Um you know there's uh no question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to people you know most people 1800 you know in 1800.
1:26:49
So the idea that we um can have any or any other idea other than they probably want to be alive, it seems re much more questionable than than than I I think um than than I think it it does.
1:27:03
Um and so there's two ways to look at it.
1:27:07
One is the the wizards say, "Let's, you know, we have an idea.
1:27:10
they're going to want to live in this, you know, certain kind of um utopia and live their longest lives and uh and uh have the maximum possible physical comfort, which is generally what the the wizards say.
1:27:21
The prophets uh might say, um, and that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
1:27:27
Um, but the prophets might say, well, we should be more epistemologically, you know, uh, humble, say, we don't know what they want to do.
1:27:33
Let's preserve as many options as possible for them.
1:27:35
Um, that doesn't seem crazy.
1:27:37
I I I personally probably leaned more toward the wizard on this, but if a prophet said that to me, I wouldn't say, "Oh, you're wrong."
1:27:42
Because that's the same argument about um 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, you know, that and gotten rid of for 10,000 years.
1:27:53
We should just make sure that we uh can track it for a couple hundred years and then there will be more options for people 200 years from now than there are today. Okay.
1:28:01
So what is wrong with the basic um free market objection to the carrying 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.
1:28:22
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 like feeding them directly then you know that'll be represented in the price and like you know and then so the the trend lines might be mistaken because the price of meat will increase or something.
1:28:43
So yeah no I think it's I think that's a very powerful argument.
1:28:47
Um but the the problem with it to to my mind is um 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 or they're 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 they aren't today.
1:29:10
They never have been in the past.
1:29:10
Um, so it seems to me an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if you truly had a free market for the for for those things, but it also seems uh pointless because uh the the if I had to bet, I'd bet that it would be the same way it's been for the last couple thousand years.
1:29:29
And we don't have a free market and we already have all kinds of weird distortions because of that.
1:29:32
you know, from if your point of view, you know, the tremendous amount of food that's wasted, the crazy arrangements we have for water in the uh this of the similar these like ludicrous things like um I have this idea, you're in Texas, right?
1:29:47
You have this thing where Texas has like its own independent grid so it can't trade energy with other states that are nearby.
1:29:53
Like what the heck is that?
1:29:54
You know, that's really crazy.
1:29:54
And there's, you know, I mean, I don't mean to pick on Texas, but it's just something I I was thinking of.
1:30:01
just equally crazy things all over the place.
1:30:04
The impossibility of building long distance um high high tension lines because um you know various states have just arbitrarily imposed rules that make it impossible.
1:30:12
There's all kinds of crazy things going on.
1:30:14
So um the the I I guess I think like what you're saying is it's very likely to to be true in a system that will never exist. Yeah.
1:30:25
Unfortunately, because it's kind of a nice idea, right? Okay.
1:30:29
that that that seems an excellent note to close on.
1:30:31
Um uh this was ext I mean I learned so much from the books and I learned so much from talking to you.
1:30:38
So I I really I really enjoy this.
1:30:40
Um the books again that we talked about were 1491 1493 the wizard and the prophet for um for anybody interested.
1:30:48
Um and then is there any other place that you would like to direct um viewers who might want to check out your work?
1:30:55
I guess, you know, stay tuned for the uh my book about the West, which should be coming out next year if I'm at all lucky. Okay.
1:31:00
And uh I'd love to have you back on again when it comes out. Oh, sure.
1:31:04
We can talk about the Texas has got an amazing history. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
1:31:10
One of the things I learned about was the Comanche Russ customers and uh their role in Texas history is just just totally eyepoppingly amazing.
1:31:16
So, that's actually a very fun part.
1:31:19
So, we can talk about your Texas roots. We definitely will.
1:31:23
Um, thanks so much for coming on, Charles. Sure. Pleasure. Nice to meet you.
1:31:30
Hey, thanks for listening.
1:31:30
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1:31:38
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1:31:43
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1:31:54
Many thanks to my amazing editor Graham Besseloo for producing this podcast and to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode uh which have helpful links and you can find them at the link in the description below.
1:32:11
Remember to subscribe on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Cheers. See you next time.