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we are here today with Charles C man Charles is renowned for many things he has won writing Awards he's written for just about every magazine I've ever heard of his books 1491 and 1493 are both best sellers and personal favorites of mine he is a platini which a nwat
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means he who knows things you could say he is a thinker teacher who is writing wisdom and just about now he has a new book out called The Wizard and the prophet two remarkable scientists and their dueling Visions to shape Tomorrow's World and this is a book
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about how to think about the environment it's a book about American history it's a book about biodiversity it's a history of the environmental movement a book about pollution like all of Charles's works it's anthropology and history and
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economics and all social science rolled into one and fun and exciting and dynamic and now we have today Charles with us Charles thank you for coming oh it's my pleasure I'd like to start with some questions about air pollution since
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the environment actually is a topic of so many of your books uh the World Health Organization estimates that each year 6 to S million people die from air pollution and yet we in the United States we we hardly ever hear about this
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is this actually one of the world's biggest environmental problems and if so why is it so neglected well it's not a big problem here I mean we've done enormous things to improve the environment in North America and in Europe what they're really talking about
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is mostly indoor cooking smoke in places like South Asia and and China as well as Urban places in Asia that have just absolutely horrific levels of smog from coal but it's so this is one of those areas in which you have enormous impacts
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in one part of the world and relatively little in another part of the world and obviously getting rid of indoor cookings on especially on biofuels and coal that especially for home heating would be a great idea for human health over in
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those areas and in your book environmental optimism versus environmental pessimism is a recurring theme on this issue of the millions of deaths from air pollution are you an optimist or a pessimist oh I I think I'm an optimist on this this one is a
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problem that we have a clear idea how to resolve there are obvious substitutes that would be much better than the kind of kerosene that they you see in Indian Villages so I I think this is a a totally lickable problem there are other
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ones that I'm much more worried about the kzit curve it states a relationship between per capita income and how willing a country is to actually fight pollution do you think the kinet curve is being rejiggered so if you look at
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the history of the United States we're really pretty wealthy until we start tackling our air pollution problems in the 1960s is China going to beat our Pace or are they going to lag behind are we getting better or worse at fighting
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generalized air pollution well we've already licked most of that problem not all of it by any means now it's concentrated in in certain areas but Africa Vietnam China India remark yeah oh they removed an incredible amount what's remarkable is that if China
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follows through on what it says it's going to do they're going to beat us oh Hollow I mean the China is way poorer than we are and they are taking some pretty Draconian measures against against air ution if they actually do it
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I'm skeptical that they're going to close down as many coal plants for example as they say they're going to close down I'm skeptical that they're going to build all those green Walls of trees that they say they're going to build I've seen them and there's a big
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difference between what is proposed at the top and what actually happens at the bottom I could be wrong they could be great how much is China's installed Co base a problem preventing them from licking most of their air pollution
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issues oh a huge problem I mean they have you know other issues as well but this is the kind of of thing like you you take the big one first the the easy one first and that would be coal although in China's case to be fair it's not so easy most of those coal plants
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are brand new so you're essentially asking them to trash an infrastructure they've just built and replace it and that's a big problem this for me is one of the reasons that uh I'm kind of upset about environmentalists in our country
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arguing against the idea of carbon capture and storage which is the leading proposal for what to do with uh coal plants like the ones in in in China it might make sense for us to just say stop using coal altogether but I think a much
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harder call in India and China and other parts of of of Southeast Asia and carbon capture seems to be the only technology that's available possibly to deal with it without requiring India and China to trash an infrastructure they've just
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built and what's the main barrier toward carbon capture and sequestration working it's super expensive and give us give us an example what it would cost well supposedly okay what you're doing in carbon capture and sequestration for
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like a coal plant is you're taking all the the gases that are emitted from it and you're combining it with a tox chemical big Silo full of it called mea and then you're boiling it and in the process it combines with the carbon dioxide and then you um I actually said
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that wrong you cool it it combines the carbon dioxide and you boil it and it releases the carbon dioxide you set up a cycle it the the costs of this are what they call parasitic costs meaning that it takes a certain amount of the energy
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produced by your power plant just to run the cleaning apparatus and typical estimates are 30 to 50% and then on top of that you're basically boiling a giant Silo full of super toxic chemicals all the time and there's all kinds of Novel
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Metallurgy that's required there's a bunch of technical development that's required this is an area basically that the coal companies have been saying that they've been developing for decades you know Clean Coal Clean Coal you can find
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advertisements back for that from the 1950s they' done practically no work and as a result there's a huge technological catch-up to be done and on carbon issues overall are you an optimist or a pessimist and why well I guess I'd say you know if you think about it in 1800
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look at the situation of the world you know we're vastly poorer a huge portion of the Earth's population is um enslaved in one way or another there's actually estimates from people like Adam um hook Shield that it's three4 of the Earth's
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population I think that seems high but you get some sort of the general idea women aren't allowed to own property I think anywhere they aren't allowed to go to college you know you name it and our world is totally transformed in the last
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two 200 years slavery was one of the foundational institutions of you know of civilization and so to me it would just be incredbly disappoint carbon in the air seems by comparison to slavery a much easier challenge although it's not
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to say a small one and what do you think the solution will look like I think there's multiple possible solutions and that's in fact what the argument to the book is there's different ways to go about and it really depends on what kind
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of future you want to have if you're what I call wizard U maybe I should call him a you know to be more exact something like a what would it be a a shetan u mist or something like technophilic mist or something so I call them Wizards you want to have big
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centralized super efficient facilities and that t typically translates into nuclear power if you're you know a profit the typical environment movement you don't like these giant centralized facilities in and of themselves and you
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want smaller much more networked systems and that looks like a complete reconstruction of the um of the grid to use um to use solar and and and wind and as well as lots and lots and lots of planting and both of them you know from the point of view of T's technology are
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equally impossible so you know we can we it's a leap in the dark no matter what we do but then That's The Human Condition isn't it but say I make an argument that you yourself have considered in print as some parts of the world lower their demand for fossil
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fuels the prices of those fossil fuels will fall and there'll always be someone who's going to burn it whether it's Vietnam or Africa or Brazil and essentially we're going to burn through everything we have at some price and the
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flow of that into the atmosphere will continue more or less unabated true or false well that's a I think that's an excellent argument and um I'm proud to have made it um so let me consider why why this man guy might be totally wrong
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okay um one is that uh there seems to be a growing sort of popular conception of carbon dioxide as pollution which it isn't obviously in the same way as sulfur dioxide and the other stuff and so one of the things that's fascinating
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to me is that when you when you talk to people in China about cleaning up they regard cleaning up the particulates and the aerosols and and carbon pretty much in the same breath if people are going to sort of make that mental category
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then then this man guy might have been gotten it all wrong and uh and we we won't just see scrubbers doing this and the second thing is that there seems to be a kind of way that a respect for um International Community and international agencies that frankly
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surprises the hell out of me yes our um current president is obviously an a counter example against that but people seem to be interested in in kinds of collective action that I would not have guessed both on the international front
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which which I think is very weak um but still there and on the regional front and personally I would see the evidence of cities taking a lead in this regions taking lead in this and then you know to some extent individual um households so
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this there's a whole institutional framework that seems to be swinging into effect to counter this sort of Jans type Paradox that you were you were talking about you know where people things get cheaper and people use more of it right
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and uh so I don't know I I I made that argument I still think it's a strong argument but maybe I'm wrong and are you a geoengineering Optimist given uncertainty it may be hard to experiment with and also the notion that countries may not agree so we might want to do one
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kind of geoengineering but Russia will have other ideas because it's a colder country can that work I think you you've hit on the to me the big issue I think the social issues in almost all these cases are much harder to solve than the
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technical issues you know geoengineering as a science and it's total infancy and there's no right now the leading technology is solar radi radiation management as they call it Sr M which basically you know means sprinkling shiny little tiny shiny particles into
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the air and reflecting back the sunlight but there's lots of other kinds uh that are at least potentially possible and so I it's difficult for me to believe that all of them will fail to you know to prove I not sure about the um
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institutional Frameworks because there is the problem of the green finger as it's called which is that geoengineering is sufficiently cheap because all you need is a bunch of airplanes that you know an eccentric rich person and maybe
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too cheap yeah maybe too cheap right whitesman and Wagner the two very good economists um have written a book about that which they call the free driver problem um as opposed to the free rider problem that it's so cheap that people
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would just take the wheel and go right and so you know if you imagine if you're Indonesia and you're threatened by Rising seas and and so forth Indonesia has about 70 billionaires in it each one of which could each one of whom could um could actually set a course of
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geoengineering on his own so you add that that's at the bottom and then you add at the top the difficulty of international coordination I think that's a very that's the tough problem as opposed to the technical problem the
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environment and water do you think there are water problems that can't be solved simply by having higher prices when needed better defined property rights when needed and also some kind of Regulation when needed or is water something we absolutely can do we just
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need the will to do it I would say this is again Complicated by people's ideas about water what you're saying is totally standard economic good sense right right and it is absolutely true that people waste staggering amounts of
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water and this is the kind of thing that uh people who study water like Peter G and the Pacific Institute they tear their hairs out about you know all the different ways that we waste water 70% of the world's water or something like
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that goes to agriculture most of that is for irrigation and you know estimates the amount of water that's lost and just totally wasted in irrigation um you know range up to 70% of that so it's 70% or 70% you're getting close to half the
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world's water just wasted so they say all things you should do which you were just talking about which is charge people you know act intelligent about this opposing this is the fact that people are not rational about water and uh have never been as as far as I can
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tell when people feel water is threatened they want more and so then the their their view is to you know to do these giant mega projects like uh Israel for example has just built these huge desalination plants all over the Mediterranean Coast they have five big
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ones and they plan to build uh three more there's another one that's going to be in akaba in Jordan that's it's even larger California has 20 of these planned and then there's these Mega uh projects which I think from a strictly
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economic cost benefit or benefit cost point of view are kind of crazy given the the wastage but there's a real pull towards doing that and I just don't know how it's going to come out isn't Israel a good example of why we should be
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optimistic yeah so now Israel has 70 times the GDP they had in 1948 10 times the number of people half the rainfall and they do Water Reclamation desalination drip irrigation they have regulation when needed I'm not saying
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they have no water problems but it's pretty well off as a nation water is not what's holding them back they do some wasteful things that may be for national security reasons and doesn't Israel show it can be done the whole world will when
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it needs to solve its water problems or no well Israel is certainly an example of what you can do um one of the Striking things is they've um oscillated between these two sides what I I call the Wizards and the and the and the profits I mean they began by
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constructing these enormous water projects um the the National Water Project which is this huge Canal that takes water from the north which has relatively um you know which is relatively plentiful water and channels it down to neev Desert then they
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realized oh my gosh we're getting in tremendous trouble with our neighbors because that water you know was supposed to be for the Jordan River and we were you know taken 70% of the water of the Jordan River so now we have to do this
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conservation program and this is exactly what you're talking about the Water Reclamation it's very Innovative drip irrigation basically in Israeli Tech um technology I me it was invented desalination also basically in Israeli technology and both of them were
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invented you know the fundamentals elsewhere and Israel took them and developed them and kind of like they're kind of like the Japan of water and they have done this extraordinary thing but as soon as desalination kicked in at the
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beginning of this Century all those little tags that you that you used to see about you know every drop counts they're all gone and only in the South now do do do do you see them and the water I just came back from there a few
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months ago and the water guys that I was talking to were sort of tearing their hair out in the way the water guys always are the idea of privatizing water companies in your view is this an underrated or an overrated idea I think it's a it's it's simultaneously both
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because it's a solution I think should be on the table in many more places than it is because the fact is that governments at every level have failed with water systems and almost anything would be better than that the problem is
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that the private companies do make the Investments and they have to get paid back and the governments then don't pay them back the individual customers do and that's frequently really tough on them you know I think this is a real
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case where where you you could make you could make an argument that government failures overtime require government subsidies to to make up for them because you talk to these play people in China who are paying a quarter to a third of
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their income for water that's quite tough that's that's a lot and that's obviously something that they you know is is a big punch in the face in in terms of what they're what they're trying to do and you're going to get that you you get you get rebellion and
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you don't want to have people revolting against their own water supply so I I think that you should be done more and the government should pay more attention let's consider a common interest we both have food and food in the environment
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yeah now as you well know global population has continued to rise but for the most part at least relative to expectations we fed many more people than most commentators ever expected was possible can this simply continue forever or is there some fixed factor in
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the system where you can't just keep on increasing your population in your food supply and every year feed a higher and higher share of the global population well that's the question right yes but what's your view and if there's a fixed
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Factor what exactly is the fixed Factor one of the things that's interesting is that you know on some level obviously the Earth is finite and so on some level Gan yes right what Gus guran makes point right so clearly there is some limit
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somewhere but where it is we just don't really have a have a clue and one of the arguments I actually put point out in his book is that there's this idea right at the beginning of the environmental movement which is making this argument
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that that there that we can't do everything we want is that there's caring capacity and it has a whole bunch of different names ecological limits planetary boundaries gets dressed up in different gues but the whole idea is
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that there's these fixed points that we cannot right surpass And yet when you look at it the argument however intuitively appealing and it's enormously intuitively appealing because the Earth is round and it's finite is very very difficult to substantiate and
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you could because it depends on what you consider those limiting factors to be and in fact uh one of the earliest calculations of this was done by the great physicist and mathematician Warren Weaver and he said well the usable
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energy is you know what we need and there's just an inordinate amount of energy coming in from the Sun every day all you know 24/7 and so if that's what your idea is this is a ridiculous thing to worry about because people will not
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want to live in a world of hundreds of billions of people is just too crowded to move and this is the wrong thing to consider the the the limiting factor other people say that's crazy we um need to have these ecosystems and yet all of
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these Concepts because they're ecology they're very difficult ecology and macroeconomics are sort of the same thing they're studying these huge systems with a zillion moving Parts none of which we understand very well par and
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poorly understood also right right and they're partisan and poorly understood and there's something there obviously just just you know the economy exists obviously there is something for macroeconomics to study but we don't really have very good tools to do it and
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they're also Afflicted with models that are adhered to far more often than they are um in terms of people's belief far more often than they are actually empirically tested but what's if you had to pick a leading candidate to be the
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fixed Factor I'm not saying you have to endorse it but what's the most likely fixed Factor if there is one well water is certainly a big candidate there's just really isn't that much fresh water we can price it more and since we have growing wealth global economy grows at
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4% a year we can subsidize you asked me what was the candidate I didn't say I was believe it right but water's obviously one of them but the hovering over it is these questions about whether these natural cycles you know is is a
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kind of a fundamental question about life itself and is an ecosystem an actual system with an Integrity of its own with rules of its own that you violate at your peril and which is the sort of fundamental premise of the environmental movement or is an
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ecosystem more like an apartment building in which there's just a bunch of people who Happ to live in the same space and share a few common necessities and I don't think ecology really has settled on this and there's a guy in
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Florida Dan simoff who's a wonderful ecologist who's kind of made a career out of destroying all of these models of these elegant models one after another so that's the fundamental guess if it turns out that it's just a collection of
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factors that we can shift around at that Nature's purely instrumental and we can do with what we want then we have a lot more breathing room if it turns out that there's these these overarching which is seems to be the intuition of
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theologists who study this then we have less room than we think David R Montgomery wrote and I quote the United States Department of Agriculture estimates it takes 500 years to produce an inch of top soil is that a plausible candidate for the fixed Factor top soil
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I don't think so top soil is really important and Nations that screw up their soil that's a bad thing that happens and when I went to the Fertile Crescent a couple of times and you see these you know soils that used to be part of the ferti Crescent irrigated or
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in Haiti or something like that you walk across the border between the Dominican so obviously that is something you should really pay pay attention to but the tools we have for measuring it are pretty poor for instance the the soil
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people have this thing called the universal soil loss equation do you know about this oh this is how they measure how much erosion it is and so when you hear that there's you know onethird of the Farmland in the middle west or
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whatever the figure is been eroded it's with the universal soil loss equ equation and and it's the best thing that people can do at the time but it really measures soil movement and an awful lot of erosion is when soil goes from one place to another you know
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if if we're next door neighbors and some of my soil blows onto your farm and your farm blows onto my farm they're both counted as eroded even though we may actually have the same amount of of top soil and that that's not because people
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are are faking it or anything it was just the best tool that was available in the 1950s and of course people like to have consistent tools and so it's called through it that said there are estimates from people in vaginan where that great
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Dutch University great Dutch agricultural University that's sort of behind the Dutch Agricultural and they believe that the actual issue is more soil contamination and um they're say that something like a third of the world's arable land is has some problems
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from contamination as in China and soil contamination is s to fix the a pollution oh boy yeah it's a big deal and you don't want soil contamination right and so that's a you know in that case it's a plausible um limiting factor
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particularly if we are don't develop remediation techniques and so I'm very interested here's an underrated one thing for you which is phyto remediation you know if you could really develop that technique and you could plant some crops that would suck
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out the aluminum or or the salt or whatever it is that's your problem with your soil that would be pretty neat a general question that what point can we say the pessimist views are wrong so as you know malus is writing about
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subsistence wages and even starvation in the 1790s there are pessimists well before malus Paul ER is writing the population bomb those predictions haven't panned out so there have been centuries Century after Century where War aside Siege of Leningrad aside the
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optimists essentially are correct most of the time the relative price of food is falling labor employed in agriculture as a percentage of the workforce is declining so what would have to happen for us to say well we've simply decided
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the pessimists are wrong we can keep on doing this I don't think the pessimists you know if you take the argument the pessimists are saying there's a finite world we can only get so much from it right that obviously is true the
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question is not so much whether they're wrong as whether they're relevant if the limit is so far out there that we don't even need to bother with it you know they're not they could still be right it just wouldn't matter and one of the ways
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of I think of of looking at it is supposedly in the um the next part of this Century we're going to you know all the demographers believe that the world population is going to roughly level off somewhere around the realm of of 10
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billion maybe it'll go you know the the quote pessimists think it'll be 11 or 12 the Optimist think will be nine but basically we're not going to get population is not going to double again nobody seems to to believe that so if that's the case and that stretches out
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as far as we can see which is what they what they say not that we can see that far then if we can feed everybody and everybody's in pretty good Comfort by you 2070 or whenever this point is I think The Optimist can declare Victory
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even though the pessimist could still be right in that there are limits just they just aren't relevant and when evaluating these issues how much do you trust market price data so you can look at the relative price of food the price of
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potatoes price of rice and that's giving you some measure of what the market thinks will be happening in the future will there be forthcoming supplies if there are not forthcoming supplies people will buy them and hoard them or speculate do you trust market prices
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enough to infer judgments from them or do you dismiss that information well it's funny you should ask I do trust market prices I but food is one of those areas in which the government Tinkers so much with with this that I'm really not
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sure what to make of them one of the the kind of eye openening for me in this was I went to Illinois Northwest Illinois and I I talked to a bunch of the farmers in Morango Illinois which is a you know corn and bean uh place and they describ
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for me all the different programs that they are eligible for and and participate in and I Now understand why economists complain about Farm subsidies because they were saying these were reduced and I couldn't believe the
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number of things that you can do if you're a farmer who produces the right commodity crops and certain crops are very definitely much more in tune with what the government wants than others so I talked to two farmers both Morango
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Nextdoor neighbors and one guy is your sort of Michael pollen ideal and uh an amazing farm he grows a thousand different varieties of of crops you know just everything you could imagine mimicking natural systems he doesn't like to call himself organic because he
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doesn't like to submit to rules that he thinks are arbitrary and outdated but we'll call them an organic with quotes because you get the idea and it's really an amazing information processing system that he has to just this extraordinarily
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complex thing and he produces a staggering amount of food off of it because he grows a lot of trees and tubers and trees and tubers are more inherently productive than um cereals like uh like wheat and uh and barley and so forth and he is eligible for nothing
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you know he has not gotten a dime from from from the government he wouldn't mind it it's not like a matter of principle but it's just as far as the government is concerned he doesn't exist whereas his nextdoor neighbor has 12200
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acres of corn and and wheat and there's an entire parade of things that he is eligible for so one guy's produce is much more expensive than than the other guys produce but it's very hard to for me as an outsider without conducting a serious study to to tell and then
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there's all these aspects of this which the system is tied together um one of the things you always hear is that meat you know every every pound of beef takes 10 pounds of grain and and so forth you've heard all this me is terrible and
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it's actually much more complicated than than that because you you know You' think that would give you some idea of price and so forth but in fact the grain that they're doing is is distiller grain which has already been used for a couple
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of other processes before it it's used to make you know high fructose corn syrup and alcohol and and and so forth so the costs of these things are all getting disseminated around to all these different products that each have their
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own set of programs and their own set of incentives and so forth so the market data from agriculture will obviously very important especially for individual people is really tough to tell what it means are you saying beef is possibly environmentally cheaper than many of us
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believe I have to yes now I should say of course it's all complicated you know you're right but for example I have I live in the country and there's a small farm just down the street from me this is Western Massachusetts Western
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Massachusetts sorry I live in Western Massachusetts and we have a boutique Farm next to us that us yuppies you know support because we like Jeremy and uh you know it's all a sort of friendly but slightly ridiculous Enterprise and he
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makes delicious the the the beef and pork he has is absolutely delicious so we pay a ludicrous amount of uh for it any any um normal person would think we were idiots but his stuff his animals they eat scraps you know they eat uh
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they eat leftovers and as far as I can tell they and they graze you know on Weeds so as far as I can tell the the environmental cost to what they do is zero or or negative in the sense that they also you know have manure and the manure is then plowed back into the to
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to the fields so obviously what he's doing is is is having extremely small impact on the environment possibly the methane now you get to these giant feed lots and this is where they're talking about how terrible it all is but that
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grain is used for so many things and the cattle themselves are used for so many things I mean even if you didn't eat meat there would still be need for leather there' still be need for keratin from and collagen and all the other
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things that come from from cattle so when you take these things and just say oh 10 pounds of grain T prod a pound of meat it also produces all this other stuff as does the grain and so I think that the environmental impact is overstated doe in part I'm sorry that
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was a very longwinded answer yeah great doe in part to the influence of Rachel Carson uh the use of DDT has been highly restricted and some people have charged this cost a fairly High number of human lives and other people are more
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skeptical what's your view I'm skeptical of the these claims in in in the sense that from what I have read I'm certainly not an expert on this the Imp impation seems to be that we're always talking about poorer Nations that don't use it
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implications seem to be that these nations would have mounted the kind of systematic DDT spraying campaigns that were seen in this country in the you know from the first world war to about the 50s most of all in the South yes most of all in the South but also you
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know in places like Long Island in the middle west and the little I have seen in malarial countries and in you know places like ner and Chad and Nigeria and so forth it just seems implausible to me that the government could have done this
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so clearly it had some impact on the margins but I I don't I don't know if we have a good idea of how much how much it is and I often think that the that the sort of debate is more heat than light now William vote who one of the two
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centerpieces of your book one of his Environmental Solutions was population control and Eugenics Julian Huxley who also plays a role in your book uh brother of Aldo Oxley he was a big advocate of eugenics these ideas have
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faded from favor within the environmental movement though not in China of course where they had a one child policy do you think the future environmentalism lies in population control at all or not population controls had such a terrible record
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because those ideas about population control were then embraced by the ecological Elite if you want to call it that in North America and Europe as well as governments in poor Nations like uh particularly India and and China and the
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result was just terrible abuses say China is one child policy was it a major disaster or was it something well the studies that I have seen suggest that if you look at the impact that it actually had on China it was negligible but if you look at the impact
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it had on individual families who were force it was terrible and so you had a policy where you caus maximum you know social disruption and personal trauma that had relatively limited impact on population itself and the reason that
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they do this is they compare the sort of trajectory of China's population and birth rate with similar Nations didn't have this and they aren't that different a lot of the TFR decline came before the one child policy yes exactly TFR is total fertility rate yeah and so you
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know it looks like if you take this evidence seriously which I I think you should I think the de Chinese demographers are pretty good it looks like this was just an awful mess and that they shouldn't have done it and that Bas you know it's just like this
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sort of boring thing they say empowering women and educating women is actually what you really want to do my colleague Robin Hansen wonders if it isn't one of the world's biggest problems that will have too few children and too low a
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population so countries such as Italy I think now have TFR of about 1.3 for Singapore and Chinese it's I think 1.1 so if you have enough countries not all of them Wealthy by the way Iran Algeria have rapidly falling uh rates of child birth and you just have a
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shrinking population all the time you have fiscal imbalances you may have lower creativity you may have a problem with aggregate demand so you'll have bad macroeconomic outcomes do you worry too much that the global population will be
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too low and will be shrinking too rapidly your colleague is completely right that the population crashes that he's talking about are going to face societies the challenges they never faced before I mean always there's been
31:39
what they call the population pyramid which is you know a small number of older people and lots of younger people in theory to support them and certainly by their by their taxes and what happens as the birth rate declines is that the
31:49
pyramid turns into a cylinder or or something like that and you have an age structure that's never really existed in human history before for and not only that but there's all these old people like me who are hanging around endlessly
32:02
and what we seem to really want to do is push down that retirement age so that the ever shrinking number of younger people will have to do more and more to support us if you go by the European example so I I do think this is going to
32:13
be a big problem and the the only upside I can see of this is that if all these people retire maybe it will postpone the problems with the shrinking amount of work that's available if if we all do this or maybe robots will be robot savor
32:27
Al um there's all these science fiction stories from the 1950s where the robots are are doing everything I remember one it was called the mightest touch or something like that where you were people were having there's so much productivity from the robots that people
32:38
had to spend all their days energetically consuming stuff just to keep up now in all of these conversations we have a segment in the middle overrated versus underrated you're free to pass on any of my questions but I'll I'm sure I just don't
32:49
think I have particularly interesting taste but go ahead Jackie Chan overrated or underrated oh I think it's impossible to overrate him Jackie Chan's amazing have you ever seen those you must have seen I I'm a big fan obviously and my
33:02
favorite is Drunken Master too which on sum issues is now just called Drunken Master but what's the best one in your view oh God they're all so they're all so good I I would have said drunk drunken uh Master do you like Steve Chow yeah yeah okay so he's he look look at
33:17
compared Jackie Chan has done what I don't know 150 movies or something a lot yeah and an incredibly large number of them are good Steve Chow has done about a third as many movies much younger of course and what is his hit rate 20 20
33:30
out of the 50 or something like that are good um so I mean that's why I say it's impossible the hit to miss ratio of Jackie Chan is unbelievable fake meat overrated or underrated I think it's overrated in the sense that it's often
33:43
described as something that's basically around the corner although I have to say I ate an impossible burger for the first time the other um the other day when and it was pretty good if I had been served that burger at like a church social
33:56
barbecue and you know where they give you these mediocre burgers and so forth I wouldn't have bat it an ey I would have thought it was a real one you live in or near Amherst so I have to ask you Emily Dickinson overrated or underrated
34:06
oh wow I think her R reputation is pretty Skyhigh probably then she is overrated but you but I I feel like that's almost like saying that I don't like the Boston Red Sox so so sorry I'll she could be properly rated properly rated oh okay yeah she's a good poet boy
34:22
Robert Frost the other Amis poet is also a really good poet he's I think he's uh my my top favorite American poet for the 20th century if someone is approaching Robert Frost for the first time what would be your pointer on how to make
34:33
sense of it the simpler the Rhymes this the more sing songy it is the more lethal the point the city of Waka overrated or underrated I'm a huge Waka fan so I don't think it's possible to over I just love that town other than
34:47
Waka What is the most underrated travel destination in the Americas that you would recommend and how should someone go about approaching a trip to that place oh wow so you do have opinions on all of these matters well I just don't
34:59
think they're very interesting ones okay they're interesting to me because whatever you say I'm going to go there unless I've been already which is actually a pretty high probability okay well would probably be Brazil or Peru where in Brazil or Peru well I'm a big
35:12
fan of South Pao and just this amazing City with Incredible stuff in it some of the best Japanese food I've ever had and Italian food it's the best Italian food outside of ital really good food really good food also the beaches are just
35:26
outside the city are great you have these fantastic Gardens by Roberto BR Marx I also really really like just cuz it's so interesting it's not as beautiful but I I I really like manous it's just such an interesting place with this fascinating history and it is of
35:40
course the gateway to the Amazon um so there was be two places in in Peru gosh there's so many different places in Peru so let me pick the place you might not likely to be go immediately which is aripa MHM but you should also go and you
35:52
can go from there to the Koka Valley which is just dazzling I love the food in aripa oh boy best spicy food in Peru yeah it's really good and it's beautiful perfect yeah what's your favorite movie and why but you can't mention Jackie Chan
36:07
again what's your favorite movie and why well the thing about favorites is the ones that have these emotional impacts on you right and um what was it I was just thinking I I will tell you this is as a college uh freshman I had a summer
36:22
job working in a movie theater and I saw the uh movies zardas a 100 times because I was stationed in the theater to stop from sne and so I think that movie has drilled into my brain so I'd have to say zardas I'm going to name three thinkers you don't
36:39
have to evaluate them overall but just make some point that comes to mind when you ponder their work Jared Diamond I think an interesting guy who really should learn more about social sciences economics in particular theory of common
36:54
property resources he's too much of a pessimist about the history of Easter Island yes I also feel like he's I I really admire his reach you know what he's what what he's trying for I don't understand sometimes why it seems to Me Maybe I'm Wrong um that he doesn't do
37:08
his homework for example there is a bunch of French and Dutch archaeologist who went to Easter Island just as as you said one oh my gosh I've lost his name he he actually became I think he was head of UNESCO for a while um great
37:20
French archaeologist anyway you wrote three books about Easter Island the UMass Library which is uh the one nearest me which has like 10 books about Easter Island about four of them three or four of them are by him so it's not obscure Source not to mention in that
37:32
and he was he pieced he went to the Dutch archives he pieced together basically the what happened to the islands is they were really small defenseless Islands at a time when European Traders were particularly rapacious and the place got just Swept
37:43
Away by slavery um disease and also the trees got cut cut down for MKS James C Scott and his theories of anarchism and governance and Conquest I think they're completely fascinating really worth knowing and I also think he pushes them
37:56
too hard bejor lomborg and the Copenhagen consensus I'm not Fami I just read the skeptical environmentalist I'm not familiar enough with what he's doing now to to say he contacted me a bunch of stuff about that time I thought what he
38:08
was trying to do was was valuable I often think that people who do this tend to be the sort of person who you know in the knowing that they're going to arouse opposition sometimes people who do this tend to like to pick a fight and so I
38:22
think he picked fights sometimes um where they weren't needed and and not not just in political sense but in the sense that he would very strongly take a position this way or that when the evidence wasn't that clear you know there there's um I I joke I have a
38:36
friend Gary TBS who um writes about diet and and so forth and I always say that there's a there's weak Gary and strong Gary and weak Gary is the idea that the evidence that carbohydrates you know are the way to go for heart heart disease is
38:50
very poor that's weak Gary Strong Gary is that carbohydrates are actually bad see there there's a big distinction between these these two and I think that Bjorn lomberg didn't often grasp this in the skeptical environmentalist which is
39:03
the thing I'm familiar with often would go beyond saying the evidence for this or that is weak to saying the evidence for its opposite it must mean that the opposite is true now we turn our attention back to the history of the new world here's a question from a reader
39:16
and I quote if Napoleon had not conquered France leading to the Louisiana Purchase would there have been no Indian Removal Act and no American Civil War is Napoleon therefore responsible for the collapse of the Native American civilizations I think
39:31
not um although your reader has obviously got um an ALT history book right right there in which that would be true you know disease emptied these um areas in the 1780s that there's a wonderful book by Elizabeth Fen called
39:44
pox Americana which is about this enormous small poox epidemic she also wrote a book about the Mandan that came out recently that talks about his as as well and so you know the native groups were just smashed by the disease or seems to have been 40 maybe even 50%
39:57
mortality rates very difficult for societies to uh recover from that and I think that people would have just moved in it is possible that Andrew Jackson didn't have to be such a jerk I'm doing a working now with a project with a
40:09
Chaka and they they s who are in Oklahoma and used to be in Mississippi and they certainly remembered they allied with him in 181 and were partially responsible for his great victories in 1812 which led him to the presidency and so they feel like he
40:21
directly and personally stabbed them in the back in fact when they said they're taking him off the $20 bill there was great rejoicing in Shock Talk country now as you well know there's a huge literature on how Cortez and the
40:31
Spaniards managed to conquer the Aztec Triple Alliance for me it's one of Mankind's most remarkable but also tragic stories but in the whole set of explanations what do you think is the underrated factor in how so few people
40:44
managed to take over such a mighty and in many ways highly Advanced civilization oh it wasn't so few that you know it was Cortez was what I think is the underrated Factor that Cortez was much less a military genius than he was a political genius he was a quite a
41:02
remarkable politician really DEA and what he did is there's a whole bunch of people the Aztecs were an Empire right the Triple Alliance and they were not nice people they're rough customers and there was a lot of people whom they had
41:14
subjugated and people whom they were Waring on who really detested them and Cortez was able to knit them together into an enormous Army lead that Army in there have all these people do all and then hi jacked the result I mean this is
41:28
an act of political genius worthy of Napoleon I wait actually Napoleon did sort of the same thing he hijacked the French Revolution put himself into power so he just okay Cortez is Napoleon here's a very general question I've wrestled with over the years you know if
41:41
I travel to most parts of Asia I actually feel really very safe even late at night when I travel in the new world depends where I am but very often I don't feel entirely safe and if you look at murder rates crime rates it does seem
41:58
on average many parts of the new world are quite a bit more violent than many parts of Asia and what theories or what categories do you apply to help explain why the new world has evolved to be relatively so violent not Canada of
42:13
course but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about how do you think about that you know I've I've often thought about that and speculated it about it because we lived in Tokyo for a year and it's you know largest city in the world
42:24
32 million people and there's no place in Tokyo there's not a bad NE you can't find trouble right and you could I mean one time I was riding on the train in in Tokyo at 1:00 in the morning uh with a friend of mine who is from just from the
42:38
United States and he suddenly realized that we we had we had had a we' gone to a saki bar and had quite a bit of sake that we were riding on the subway 1:00 and we were both a little you know unsteady on our feet and he he got alarmed right because this is something
42:51
you wouldn't do in many places in the United States or certainly you know Mexico City or what have you and and then he looked around and he realized that every other person on the train was drunk too and you could you see these like the
43:02
Cherry Blossom Festival where everybody goes out to The Parks and everybody in Tokyo is completely plowed at 11 o'clock in the morning and there's no fights you know there there's hardly even any litter it's it's really remarkable so I
43:15
thought about why did the Japanese do this and to some degree it has to do with a level of social engineering I I think that we are really uncomfortable with if you get on the subways you hear all the time these sort of chirpy female
43:28
voices telling you something in Japanese and when I lived there learned enough Japanese to realize they're always saying you know hey let's not talk on our phones it's so rude or you know hey don't do this and it's you know those
43:39
sort of admonishing Nanny State type things that uh we Americans find so irritating they're just all over the place and they also have a zillion cops who are you know just everywhere Tokyo has a huge police force I mean it's a huge City but it has a much police box
43:56
every corner they they have one one time um because we were idiots we didn't understand how our new stove worked and we caused a a fire in in our stove and the police were there I swear within a minute because the the kiosks are always
44:11
you know three blocks away away from you they ran over on foot and helped us put out the the fire so when you have that degree of being watched and that degree of social control I think it has some some impact unfortunately I think this
44:21
is a disquieting answer for people like me who are Americans who don't like being supervised in this way as you know there are still many naat speaking villages in Mexico other non-spanish languages very often a village of this kind would have a thousand people 2,000
44:35
people say The Mexican government has you in to advise them and maybe they have and they say we're looking to make some changes to improve well-being in those Villages what would you recommend the big problem I think with Mexico is
44:47
official corruption it's just terrible I think it's underreported if any anything it's just staggering the the level of malfant and and and incompetence there and just you know on every level things that most governments wouldn't even
45:03
think to loot have already been looted there I remember I was shocked you know they have these uh kupo and these systems for subsidizing corn which they they have in in in Mexico and every small village has those little shelters
45:16
where you know the little concrete Dome structures where you're supposed to bring your corn in and then you know it gets packaged and sent off to the fa Factory and it's a it's a kind of national it's a it's a remnant of the AO system when I went down to Waka and I
45:30
was looking at at these no it's chapus excuse me all of them had been made with defective concrete and you know somebody had made and they were all crumbling and falling apart and the corn was being spoiled and then you actually had to pay
45:42
off the inspect it was just you know the corruption just permeates the things so basically I would tell the government that they should I I think if they fired pretty much everybody in the government and hired a new government they would be
45:53
better off I mean I'm joking obviously but the Mexican people are just wonderful you know it's it's a cultural full of all these people who know how to do all this stuff there's so many people in Mexico in rural Mexico know how to
46:05
wire their houses they know how to do the plumbing they know how to build with cement you know they they come over to the United States and they're tremendously in demand all through the Southwest in California and you know you see these neighborhoods that were former
46:17
dumps where they're now middle-class neighborhoods where everything is built by the people themselves there's no lack of knowledge or Enterprise there you have to feel like what's holding them back is the government where's the best
46:26
food in Mexico I'm just a Waka fan so the City or surrounding Countryside and Villages they're both they're different they're different boy the city is the place where I've had the best food but also you could some of it's pretty
46:38
touristy and you I like the suburbs of walk the best and I I think actually yeah actually the immediate suburbs yes yes that's where okay is a bit spoiled at this point yeah how much early civilization was there in the Amazon
46:51
basin and why has this topic been neglected for so long it appears there was much more than pre previously thought and it was neglected for a variety of reasons one was there is this long-standing belief that tropical forests simply couldn't sustain complex
47:04
civilizations and that began you know well in the 19th century with this whole idea that they're too hot and people can't do things in hot and areas and they're too wet and and uh moved on with the idea that they don't have stone and
47:15
then got given an ecological gloss um by largely by Betty Mears and um her her late husband and there is this whole idea that there that the soil is too poor and people are incapable of overcoming this limitation this is and so consequently you could not develop
47:31
the tropical forest and this was then embraced by environmental groups who want to preserve the tropical forest as a reason to do it you know that you're just going to wreck it and so there was a tremendous prejudice against it and it
47:44
was only really in the um 9s when mainly Brazilian archaeologist but also some some of Americans started looking that they discovered every place that people have really seriously looked they found much more more than previously thought
47:56
and the work of Michael heckenberger on the shingu is the most famous one where he's found these sort of network cities that are very re reminiscent you know um Garden cities of tomorrow that book from yes they're they're quite reminiscent of
48:08
those cities in terms of complexity or living standards what would you compare it to say from history do you have a broad sense it's easy to live there so in terms of living standards they were doing great I mean there the environment
48:20
is incredibly Rich you don't get that much meat but so food and water is fantastic that was not a given in lots of places but in the terms of material technology it's really unclear they they had no stone or metal it just wasn't available and so you know it it's
48:36
unclear how much you need stone or metal to have enduring technological um Enterprises you know for instance you can do a lot with rubber and these kind of things but they vanish so you there's going to require to really ascertain how
48:48
much they had is going to require very sophisticated archaeological work there's a wave of revisionist account suggesting that in some ways the invention of Agriculture may have been if not a mistake at least bad for Humanity for many many centuries and
49:01
that we've been underrating the lives of hunter gatherers this isn't anymore a new argument and there's much earlier version say from rouso but what's your take on the whole debate of agricultural existence versus hunter gatherers
49:12
relative to other people where do you stand on that question I guess I'm agriculture is what allowed us to build up a surplus a surplus is what allows people to specialize it's good for us right it's good for us it's clearly good for us but the overall compar
49:26
Society moves to agriculture 300 years later is it better for them well if you listen to James C Scott no right yes I think he underrates the potential for being awful outside of those um State societies uh I think that I suspect that
49:41
each of them was awful in their own way and yes except um you certainly had more freedom of action in those non-state societies and that was particularly true you'll notice in his book um Against the Grain he carefully excludes tropical
49:54
forests and other environments he's really talking about grain civilizations and so the answer for them is yeah it was it was tough I don't think that that was true for you know tropical forest in Africa and Asia and uh and South America
50:07
and certainly they and it may not even have been true in places like Peru you know most archaeologists think that uh it was plentiful there there's so much fish that you really didn't you know you could be in a state and you really
50:18
didn't have to work that hard it's only when you get to the Inca and those kind of people that you start getting these sort of totalitarian Enterprises now a much earlier Charles C man wrote a book co-authored a book called the aspirin
50:29
Wars and a reader writes to me the following question quote maybe simply ask him what pain reliever he uses and ask what he has to say about the fda's delays in addressing known health risks of high doses of Tylenol combined with alcohol you're free to pass but if you
50:45
would care to address this I personally typically use well I take aspirin for my for my heart I've been instructed to do this by my doctor so you know I take a baby aspirin and we typically have ibuprofen around the house because my
50:59
daughter takes it for um the reasons that women especially take ibuprofen for period pain and so I do that sort of by default they all work pretty much the same for me I think the FDA needs the the what's happening with the delay in
51:13
that is that the the FDA has lost any power other than to delay and that's you know there's a whole complex of reasons why some of the drugs and things that they're asked to um regulate are enormous complicated they're very very
51:26
short staffed they're under they're underfunded they're under considerable political pressure it's sort of a good idea that needs to be uh shaken out and and rethought I think and overall how efficient are aspirin markets today you
51:39
know I just don't know the answer to that question now because it's been a while since I've looked at them but in the 1990s what was your argument well there you know you're you're dealing with sort of pure capitalism you're dealing with products that for most
51:49
people can't really distinguish them and so that they're um they're kind of an Exemplar of what of the power of marketing I don't know if that counts as efficient or not as a question I like to ask many of our guests you don't work
52:01
from inside the Traditional Academy you don't have tenure you don't have an overwhelmingly single academic specialization but yet you're remarkably productive your works are in scholarly circles very highly respected hardly anyone if anyone knows more about the
52:17
history of the new world than you do as Illustrated in your books 1491 and 1493 the breadth and also depth of your knowledge of the environment and history of environmental movements in your new book The Wizard and the prophit again
52:29
seems virtually without parallel so I would ask what is the Charles C man production function like how do you get this stuff done what is it you know about being productive and your path I'm not saying you would tell other people to do exactly what you did but what's
52:43
your insight into how you have become Charles C man what's your production function what's the secret well I don't go to meetings unfortunately Academia is replete with with meetings one of the reasons for living in amorist is that
52:56
they don't request me to come and and and talk to people and so there's a huge amount of sort of the overhead of say an academic job right that I'm very lucky not to have to have to do the other thing is that because I live near a university I'm able to use the
53:13
University of Massachusetts library and the other um there's a bunch of colleges and university around here good libraries of wonderful thing and they're kind enough to let me use it even though I'm Like A Parasite the second thing is
53:25
is the wonderful tradition of Scholars in which if somebody with a plausible interest in what they're doing calls them up or writes to them nine times out of 10 they're very happy to talk to you about what they're interested in I can't
53:36
tell you how grateful I am to this tradition you know people will talk to me for hours gains them nothing I mean I I I try to make a pleasant for them but frankly there're it's sort of nuts but they're they're willing to do this and
53:49
then the second thing is that I am able to sit down and and read a lot of stuff and my my secret weapon is that I can that I can read that you can read you can read quickly perhaps I can read fairly quickly and I'm not afraid of numbers and awful lot of journalists
54:03
aren't afforded the Leisure to or time or whatever they to to read and an even larger percentage of them are much more scared about numbers than they should be and I was always raised by my father that if you stare at something long
54:15
enough and ask enough questions you can uh always find you can always figure out the gist of it and how do you organize your work day then I'm a night person um for your work night however your work yeah and um so I typically spend the
54:30
morning dealing with correspondents and the sort of overhead of the modern electronic era and then I am able to work from so say 1 to 500 then I cook dinner for the family with my wife and then I'll work late at night and living
54:48
in a Countryside with few distractions has been very good for me just to recap the subtitle of Charles C man's book is is two remarkable scientists and their dueling Visions to shape Tomorrow's World those two scientists are Norman borag and William vote environmental
55:04
optimists and pessimists respectively the title is The Wizard and the prophet I love this book I encourage you all to read it and I thank you Charles for coming and joining us today oh it's totally my pleasure thanks for listening to
55:19
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show