Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry

Host: Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including *1491: New Revelations of America Before Columbus*, *1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created*, and *The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Vision to Shape Tomorrow's World*. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.

Charles Mann: It's a pleasure to be here.

Host: My first question is, how much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? At some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World and they were going to bring their diseases. Because of disparities in where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cite is correct, then some of these places were bound to be better, have good institutions. Some of them were bound to have bad institutions. And because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, maybe 50 years down the line, somebody from Italy does it. What is the contingency here?

Charles Mann: Well, I think some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that sometime people from Eurasia and people from the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen? And there was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres, largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia. That led almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases, diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are that kind of disease. So they're going to meet, there's going to be those kinds of diseases.

But it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called *Civilizations* that does just that. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America than they did, and they brought the diseases so that by the time of Columbus, the epidemiological balance was different. When Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went to Europe. The Inca conquered Europe in this. It's far-fetched, but it does say that even this encounter will happen and the diseases will happen, but it doesn't happen in the way that they did.

It's perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether this was a good idea or not. You had a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy, asking the Pope, is it okay that we do this? You can imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So some of it was going to happen, I think. But how exactly it happened is really up to chance and contingency and human agency.

Host: In the 15th and 16th century, when the Spanish first arrived, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just where you should have expected that a civilization like this would be functioning at any given time period?

Charles Mann: Typically, empires are much more jumbly, fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Cortez was able to do with the Aztecs—they're better called the Triple Alliance; "Aztec" is an invention from the 19th century—was that it was three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. But the other two guys really resented them; they were the superior guys. What Cortes was able to do was to foment a civil war within the Aztec empire and to take some of the enemies of the Aztecs and some of the members of the Aztec empire and create an entire new order.

There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't emerged into the popular consciousness. It was new and I didn't include it in *1491* or *1493* because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it. Largely Spanish and Mexican scholars have written about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards, Tlaxcala, Tlalco, and so forth, actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there is a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published *1491*.

In that sense, yes, but also the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. What Cortes does is he marries his lieutenants into these indigenous things, creating a hybrid nobility that then extends on to the Inca. The same thing for the Inca. It's a very powerful but also unstable empire, and Pizarro has the luck to walk in right after a civil war and a massive epidemic. He gets them at a very vulnerable point. But again, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allies with the losing side in the Civil War and is able to create a new rallying point, and they attack the winning side. Empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.

Host: It does remind me of the East India Trading Company and the Mughal Empire. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his guys in. I've been reading *The Anarchy* by William Dalrymple. It's an amazing book, and it's so oddly similar to what happened. There is this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal Empire, and one side thought, we'll get these foreigners to come in and we'll use them. That turned out to be a big mistake.

Charles Mann: Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire, and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was, I think, one to three million at the peak. That is only possible if you have cooperation of at least the elites.

Host: It sounds similar to what you were saying with Cortez marrying his underlings to the nobility.

Charles Mann: Yes. There's this thing that I think is not stressed enough in history, which is that often the elites recognize each other and they join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. That's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there's this amazing efficiency; it's that it's a mutually beneficial arrangement for them. Tlaxcala, which is now a Mexican state, wasn't really fully part of the Spanish Empire. The people kept their integrity, and it really wasn't part of Mexico until 1857 or something like that. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis. The elites made out like bandits from the British Empire.

Host: Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the New World, in Haiti? Why weren't more of them successful, given that the ratios between slaves and the owners were huge?

Charles Mann: I guess you would have to define "successful." Haiti wasn't successful if you meant creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time. Haiti, partly because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations, was in terrible shape. Whereas there were things like Palmares, where for more than 100 years you had people who were self-governing. Eventually they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil.

There's a great Brazilian classic, like *Moby-Dick* or *Huck Finn* is to the U.S., called *Os Sertões* by a guy named Euclides da Cunha. It's translated into English as *Rebellion in the Backlands*. It's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves in the 1880s, how they had kept their independence informally from the time of colonialism. The new Brazilian state tries to take control and they fight them to the last person. So you had these effectively independent areas, de facto if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the U.S. too, in the Great Dismal Swamp, and maroon communities in North Carolina. There are certainly ones in Mexico where everybody just agreed these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything. If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.

Host: But it seems like these are temporary successes.

Charles Mann: How long do nations last? Genghis Khan—how long did the Khanate last? It had some impact.

Host: That's true.

Charles Mann: I know what you mean. They had overwhelming odds against them. There is an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. For the same reason that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality, it was seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.

Host: It reminds me of James Scott's *Against the Grain*, where he pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there are many examples where people just choose to run away and live as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.

Charles Mann: Yes, exactly. This is part of that dynamic. A certain number of people—who wants to be a slave? As many people as possible leave. It's easier in some places than others. It's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon, and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They ended up not being slaves.

Host: What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present, but at a particular time ended up being at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? Britain bans the slave trade, and within 100 or 200 years, there's basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world.

Charles Mann: This is a really good question. The answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever, for decades. There are a bunch of different explanations. The reason I think it's so hard to pin down is that it's kind of amazing. If you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries where slavery was not legal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It was the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi, which I think is still the oldest complete legal code we have, about a third of it is about the rules for buying, selling, and mistreating other human beings. This thing has been going on for a very, very long time. Then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes.

So there's some explanation. Machinery gets better. The reason to have people is that you have these intelligent, autonomous workers who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. If you have a chance to replace them with machinery or to create wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but have more legal rights, maybe that's a better deal for you.

Another explanation is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with agricultural labor. As agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery became less and less important, and it became easier to get rid of it. Another has to do with the beginning collapse of the colonial order.

I think part of it has to do with the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various others. They were incredibly influential. To some extent, I think people started saying, wow, this is really bad. I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment. I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement which are all tangled up in South Asia. I just don't know enough to say anything intelligent.

Host: The social aspect is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation and industrialization making slavery redundant—by the time that might have explained why it expanded, the original inception in Britain was before the Industrial Revolution took off. That was purely them taking a huge loss because this movement took hold.

Charles Mann: The same thing is true for Las Casas. In the 1540s, he sort of comes out of nowhere and starts saying, hey, this is bad. He is this predecessor of the modern human rights movement and is an absolutely extraordinary figure. He has huge amounts of influence and causes Spain in the 1540s to pass what they call the New Laws, which says no more slavery. If it had been enacted, it would have been a devastating blow to the colonial economy in Spain, because it all depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in northern Mexico and Bolivia. That was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire—it was all slave labor. They actually tried to ban it. You could say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned, but this actually happened in the 1540s largely because people like Las Casas said this is bad, you're going to hell for doing this.

Host: I'm super interested in discussing with you once we get into *The Wizard and the Prophet* section how movements like environmentalism have been hugely effective, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. But let me continue asking about globalization in the New World. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent, and what things do both of them end up doing?

What I found really interesting from the book was that both of them developed pyramids. Who would have thought that?

Charles Mann: That's also geometry. There are only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. Pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are easier to build. As you get out of a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it, and that gets harder. Pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one on. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me.

What you make them of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a whole lot of stone, so people are going to make earthen pyramids. If you want them to stand for a long time, there are certain things you have to do for the structure, which people figure out. Similarly for the pyramids in Egypt, you had all this marble around, so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems from today's perspective incredibly wasteful. You're going to have some universals like that, along with the apparently universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated.

Host: I visited Mexico City recently. The pyramids there—what struck me was that they didn't have the wheel, and they didn't have domesticated animals. The amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put that thing together as basically a vanity project.

Charles Mann: Sure. But one of the really interesting things about Teotihuacan—if I was writing the 2000-page version of *1491*, I would have included this. Teotihuacan pretty much starts out as a standard imperial project. They build all these huge castles and temples. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience for all. But then something happens to Teotihuacan, and we don't understand why. After that, all these new buildings spring up in the next couple of hundred years, and they're all very, very similar. They're like apartment blocks. There doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is, and that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status.

It looks like there could have been a political revolution of some sort. They created something much more egalitarian, probably with kings, but a bunch of good guy kings who aren't interested in elevating themselves so much. There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wengrow and David Graeber, *The Dawn of Everything*, about this. They argue that Teotihuacan is an example of an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. In my view, they go a little overboard. It was also an aggressive imperial power conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way starts looking very differently quite quickly.

You see this lots of times in the Americas. In the Southwest, have you ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places? You should absolutely go. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon that if they were anywhere else, we would call them castles. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, has like 800 rooms. It's clearly an imperial venture. On one side, getting the good light and good sun, is a whole line of these huge castles. On the other side is where the peons lived. We know that starting around 1100, everybody just left. Their descendants start the Pueblo, who are this intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing, tongue-in-cheek but also seriously, that this is the first American revolution. They got rid of these kings and created these very different, much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice.

Host: I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. The buildings that survive might be better constructed because they were for the elites. Where everybody else lived would have just washed away over the years.

Charles Mann: What's happened in the last 20 years is much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. That is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only things that survived, and the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure. But they have done LIDAR and ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this more egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. It's possible that there are even more really, really poor people, but at least you see an aggressively large middle class there, which is very different from the picture of the ancient world in which there's the sun priest and then all the peasants.

Host: Is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point?

Charles Mann: Sure. This is sort of a sequel or offshoot of *1491*. That book was supposed to end with another chapter about the American West, where I grew up. Apparently I had a lot to say, because when I outlined the chapter, the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. I tried to chop it up, and it was awful, so I just cut it. If you carefully look at *1491*, it doesn't really have an ending. It just has the author going, hey, I'm ending, look at how great this is. This has been bothering me for 15 years.

During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home, I hauled out what I had. I've been saving string and tossing articles into a folder. I thought, okay, I'm going to write this out more seriously now, 15 or 20 years later. It was pretty long. I thought maybe this could be an e-book. I showed it to my editor, and he said, that is not an e-book, that's an actual book. So I've taken that chapter, and I hope I haven't padded it. It's about the North American West.

Something I've added is thinking about what the West is going to be like tomorrow, 30 or 50 years from now. We won't know who's president or governor, but there are some things we can know. It would be a surprise if it isn't hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent. There will be a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific Coast. It's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be a center of energy—whether it's solar, wind, petroleum, or hydroelectric—the West is going to be economically extremely powerful because energy is a fundamental industry.

The last thing, and this is the most iffy, is that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. It's been going in a jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing and overlapping sovereignties, and nature is going to be in a turmoil. That actually sounds like the 1200s.

The conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and says there is this break point when people who look like me came in and rolled in from the east and took over everything. The West disappears as a separate entity, native people disappear, nature is tamed. That was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is?

Host: No.

Charles Mann: He's one of these guys nobody knows, but he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote an article in 1893 called "The Significance of the Frontier." It established this idea that there is a frontier moving from east to west. On this side was savagery or barbarism, and on this side was civilization and tame nature. It goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks in different form. We don't call native people "lurking savages" like he did, but it's in my kids' textbooks. It's such a bedrock thing.

I'm saying that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. There's a wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, who says, to know the past, you first have to understand the future. What he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is saying, how did we get here? How did we get there?

Host: And to get that, you have to have an idea of what the there is to do this. And so I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West, you know, that I talked about in mind, and that gives you a very different picture. A lot more about indigenous fire management and the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid.

Host: Yeah, I love that quote. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but let's just stick with that for a second. I'm curious if you think that... I remember the chapter of 1493 where you talk about these rowdy, adventurous men who way outnumber the women in the silver mine and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio, you have the same kind of frontier spirit, maybe not the same kind of physical violence. Let's hope. Sociologically, is there any similarity there?

Charles Mann: I think it's funny. I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this sort of off the top of my head. And then with the idea that at the end of it, I can say, wait a minute, that's ridiculous. Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose or were oblivious about what they had to lose and kind of had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things and just get up and keep trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. And it's pretty clear and are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's a, at least in this sort of shallow comparison, there's some certain similarities. And I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It is absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia and in northern Mexico created, to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these sort of cesspools of violence and exploitation whose consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products. I use them every day and I curse them every day.

Host: Right.

Charles Mann: I want to give you an example. In my own thing, the internet has made it possible for me to do something like have a Twitter thread and have millions of people read it and have a discussion. That's really amazing. At the same time, yet today, the Washington Post has an article about how every book in, I think it's Texas, it's one of the states, that a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. And they can see and look for patterns of people taking out bad books and this sort of stuff. And I think like, whoa, that's really bad. That's not so good. And it's really the same technology that, you know, this dissemination and collection of information, vast amounts of information with relative ease. So, right. All of these things, you take the bitter with a sweet.

Host: Yeah. I want to ask you again about the contingency thing, because there's so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think the, you talk about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, gold and copper and things like that, but then they didn't do iron or steel. And you would think that given the warring nature of these, iron would be such a huge help. And there's a clear incentive to build it. There's millions of people living here who could have built or developed this technology. Same with the wheel. So what is the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with just didn't happen?

Charles Mann: I know. It's just amazing to me. I don't know. And this is like one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained and I went out and I walked the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass. You pick it up and sometimes there's little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. And every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes, and it forms a lens. You can look through it and you can see, it's not a very powerful lens, but you can see it's magnified. And you think, how long has there been crabgrass and leaves and water? Just forever. We've had glass forever. How is it that we had to wait for van Leeuwenhoek or whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. Or, in the book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys, what was it? So there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. And one of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. That's the most wonderful thing about trade.

Charles Mann: In the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel. It was on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart would have to be pulled by people. That would imply, to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they did have travois, which are these things that you hold. They have skids that are shaped like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground. You don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this and you think, maybe the ultimate labor savings was that this was good enough and you didn't have to build and maintain these roads. So maybe it was rational. Or maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know.

Charles Mann: Similarly with steel, I think there's some values involved. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those sword-like things they had in Mesoamerica called macuahuitls. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them, and they are sharp as hell. Don't run your finger along the edge because you'll just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade. It doesn't rust, but it's much more brittle. The Spaniards were really afraid of them because a single blow from these heavy, sharp blades could kill a horse. I mean, they saw people whack off the head of a horse with a single blow from a big, strong guy. So they're really dangerous, but they're not long lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different. Conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers and grunts. It was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do in war than it would have for Europe's. That's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario in which it's not just blinkered, but an expression of what those people were trying to do on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig called *Aztec Warfare*, which is a military history of the Aztecs. It's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit. And he finally just says, we don't know why they didn't. But this worked for them.

Host: Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to what do you think about China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic thing? Or Japan giving up the gun, actually banning guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, they said, "Nope, don't want them," and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, Japan, under the Edo period, had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war.

Charles Mann: Interesting. It's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways.

Host: Right. Yeah. Fukuyama in *The End of History* is obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But he has this thing at the end where he's like, "Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it."

Charles Mann: Anyways.

Host: So when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story. Maybe it was a superstitious explanation, but some way of explaining what is happening. What was it like? How did they account for it?

Charles Mann: You have to remember the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. Neither the Spaniards, the English, or Native people had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad and you got, and the air was bad and that was malaria. That was an example. God is in control of the whole business. When the diseases came, there's a line from my distant ancestor, Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who is my ancestor, about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms. And more or less, Native people did, too. All over and over again, there is this thing like, "We must have done something bad for this to have happened." This is a very powerful, demoralizing thing. Your gods had either punished you or failed you. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads, because people with their God were coming, and they seemed to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God. Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on. But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, "Well, maybe I should adopt their God."

Host: Yeah, this is fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book. There's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?

Charles Mann: No. Well, not the ones that I've read. There are two reasons for that. One is it's not really a mystery if you have a society that's epidemiologically naive. Smallpox sweeps in, kills 30% of you. Measles kills 10% of you. And this all happens in a short period of time. That's really tough. Look what COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's one 330th of the population. And it wasn't even the most economically vital part of the population. It was elderly people like my aunt. I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer, because I don't mean it that way, but it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that. And you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.

Charles Mann: That goes to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in ways that you sometimes do. Both of them talk about the Maya collapse, but there are 30 to 40 million Maya people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. One time, in the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost Mexican province. That is where you probably heard about Comandante Zero and the rebellions going on. We were looking at some Maya ruins and they were too beautiful. I stayed too long. We were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. We got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, "Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this." The guy comes and he looks at us and says, "Who are you?" I say, "We're American tourists." He just gets this disgusted look and says, "Go on." I said, "Wait a minute, what do you mean?" He says, "We're hunting for Mexicans." I drive about a mile and I think, "Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico." And those were Maya. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when they have their Maya radio stations, their Maya schools, their people speaking Maya in their home. It's true they don't have giant castles anymore, but it's odd to think of that as a collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions.

Charles Mann: So there's this whole aspect of what do you mean by collapse. You see that in *Against the Grain* by James Scott, where you say, "What do you mean barbarians? These guys have it pretty good." If you're an average Maya person working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities, it probably wasn't all that great. After collapse, you were probably better off. So all of that is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that don't either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment, particularly of the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond's. He talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land in the middle of the ocean. Dutch guys come there. It's the only wood around forever. They cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair. And they enslaved most of the people who were living there. We know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.

Host: 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 half the people that are going are dying? Why didn't they just stop?

Charles Mann: That's a really good question. That's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say they were thinking not purely economically. Part of it is the backers of the Virginia company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They were burning through their cash. They did these rosy presentations and they said, "It's going to be great. We just need this extra money," kind of the way that Uber did. Then there's this tremendous burn rate. Now the company's in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these cabs. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations from Uber and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company.

Charles Mann: A second thing is that there is this dogged belief, based on inabilities to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I think I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing this little skinny, Philippines-like islands. There was a thought that 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 China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought-to-be very narrow continent. Sir Francis Drake and people like that had shown that there was a west coast, so they thought the whole thing was this narrow Panama-like inlet. So there's this geographical confusion.

Charles Mann: Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity because it's not perishable, it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back. It's money, essentially. You dig up money in the hills. There's this longstanding belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas. We just need to find it. So there's always that hope. And finally, there's this kind of imperial bragging rights. We can't be the only guys without a colony. You see that later in the 19th century with Germany. It becomes a nation and one of the first things it does is look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed and sets up its own mini colonial empire. So there's this keeping up with the Joneses aspect. It just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class that you got to have an empire. It seems very culturally part of this, and I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to annex other things. You see that over and over again all over the world. So all those things contribute to it: the out-and-out lying, the delusion, plus hubris.

Host: Yeah. It seems that the colonial envy has probably today spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. But it is this kind of impulse: if you're a nation trying to rise, you know, "I gotta go over there. I gotta go over there. Look what a big guy I am."

Charles Mann: Yeah, exactly.

Host: Speaking of China and speaking of silver, I want to ask you about the silver trade. So excuse another tortured analogy. When I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up in China, I'm looking at how you're describing how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. People needed a reliable medium of exchange and then they had to give up real goods from China just in order to get this silver, which is just a medium of exchange. It's not creating more apples. I was thinking about this and I was like, this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today. Obviously to a much smaller magnitude, but in the sense that you're using up goods. I mean, it's a small amount of electricity all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake, like you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think? Is there a similar thing where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?

Charles Mann: That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way that money works, right? I go into a store at Starbucks and I buy a coffee and I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is, of course, replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money that to us seems very silly, like the cowrie shell or on the island of Yap, where they had giant stones and those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things, such as in Bitcoin's case, strings of zeros and ones. So that part of it makes sense to me.

Charles Mann: What is extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly, which is what you're talking about in China, where people got a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get the money. I don't have to work hugely to get a dollar bill. It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing this. You're right. And that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's to a lesser extent what you're doing in Bitcoin. I haven't thought about this, but the Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it is absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change. To set them up, he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. I was saying, "Who would be your customers?" He said, "Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits." I just thought, that is really crazy, to completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. You're right. And that was partly what was happening in China. They were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes. But it was definitely weak in the country.

Host: Yeah, well, actually, the thing you're talking about in some sense, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano. They were going to use the geothermal from the volcano to make people come there to mine cheap Bitcoin.

Host: Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct or the wizards more correct for that given time period? Because you have the introduction of, as you describe them in the book, potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases population. But then again, it reaches a carrying capacity. And then obviously, there's other kinds of ecological problems as causes as you describe in the book. So is this evidence of the wizard worldview, that you had this potato and then population balloons? Or are the prophets right, that carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually?

Charles Mann: Okay, so let me interject here for those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book *The Wizard and the Prophet*. There are these two camps that have been around for a long time regarding how we think about energy, resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, you can call them that, that's my name for them. Stewart Brand calls them druids. In fact, the original title was going to involve the word druid, but my editor said nobody knows what a druid is, so I had to change it to wizards. Anyway, wizards say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say, "No, natural systems are governed by laws. There's an inherent carrying capacity or limits or planetary boundaries that say you can't do more than so much."

Charles Mann: So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it has 20% of the world's population, but it only has 7 or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. There are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Huanghe or Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools. That's rice. So there's this paradox: how do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water? If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. Prophets believe there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian limits after Malthus. The question is, with the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?

Charles Mann: The great thing about history and this sort of thing is it provides evidence for both sides. In the short run, when American crops come in, the potato, the sweet potato, and maize corn are the first staple crops that are dry land crops that can be grown in the western half of China, which is very dry and mountainous and has little water. Population soars immediately afterwards, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, it becomes adaptable, and China becomes this wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short, it's a couple of centuries, it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So it provides evidence, if you like, for both sides. One is it increases human capacity, and the second, unquestionably, is it increases human numbers, increases possibility. The second is it leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.

Host: Yeah, that's a thick coin with the two sides. By the way, I realize I haven't gotten to all the wizard and prophet questions, and there's a lot of them. I certainly have time. I'm enjoying the conversation.

Charles Mann: One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average mainstream journalist interviewer. I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired by them, they should switch roles or something. So it's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects that I find fascinating.

Host: It's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about *The Wizard and the Prophet*. I just recently had Will MacAskill on, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him, Norman Borlaug said that he saved a billion lives. But MacAskill pointed out that that's an exceptional result. He doesn't think the technology is that contingent. If Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stocks. Counterfactually, in a world where Borlaug doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. What would you do? Do you agree? Or what is your response?

Host: To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this. I mentioned in the book that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist who is kind of a step behind him and did much of the same work.

Host: At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did is really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the plant breeding dogmas of his day. That all matters, and his insistence on feeding the poor. So he did remarkable things.

Host: Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered. It would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. That would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim, because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism and the discovery of antibiotics were leading to a real population rise. The amount of human misery that would have occurred is really frightening to think about.

Host: So in some sense, I think he's right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.

Charles Mann: Another thing you might be concerned about is the hostile attitude people had towards the Green Revolution right after. If the actual implementation of these restraints in Pakistan and India had been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are totally won over by the prophets and they decide not to implement this technology at all. Think about what happened to nuclear in the 70s in many different countries. Maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution.

Charles Mann: It's important to beat the prophets. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it, but one way you could put it is it's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get the technology in there.

Host: You're right. In my opinion, this is just my personal opinion, you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible about diagnosing problems. Very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution, dead right. They're completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like my feeling with my editors. My editors often will point out problems in the manuscript. I almost never agree with their solution, but they're correct about the diagnoses.

Host: The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it's also a fact that it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me of this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu and I listened to this, I thought, "Oh, I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat and they made it into Indian wheat." I don't even know if Borlaug ever really grasped that they had done that.

Host: By the way, a person for you to interview is Marcy Baranski. She's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution.

Charles Mann: She sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.

Charles Mann: If we apply that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that are as powerful as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the Green Revolution could not have happened or would have taken way too long?

Host: It's possible. I mean, bureaucracies can always go rogue. Government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. Let us take, for example, the current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken top secret documents to his house in Florida. Let's accept the argument that these were super secret documents and should not have been in a basement. But he says, "Whatever the president says is declassified is declassified." Let's say that's true.

Host: Obviously that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario. So you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassifying. Immediately you add delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power. So you have this problem with government, which is that people occasionally do completely screwy things. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that, and that impedes everybody else.

Host: In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30s when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfanilamide that killed hundreds of people. It was a flat out poison. You think, "Who would do that?" But somebody did that. They created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay. Then something with thalidomide, which they did stop here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check.

Host: So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by government here, in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. The question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well-managed and sometimes it's not.

Host: It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews, and they were given to millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. That's a real regulatory triumph. So that would be the counterexample. You have this new thing that you can feed people, and they let it through very quickly.

Host: On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, they've done extraordinary efforts to test, especially for the chestnuts. I'm sure those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. So the flaws that you identify, this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case, and the edge case sets the rules. Unless you're very careful, that makes it very difficult for everybody else.

Charles Mann: The vaccines are an interesting example here, because one of the things you talk about in the book is the possibilities with regards to climate change, that you could have some kind of geoengineering. You mentioned in the book that as long as just one country tries this, they could effectively change the atmosphere for a relatively modest amount of money.

Charles Mann: But then I look at the failure of any government to approve human challenge trials. Something that seems like an obvious thing to do that would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. I wonder if the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen, because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.

Host: Let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend Neal Stephenson called *Termination Shock*, which is about some rich person just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere.

Host: I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already, and that's way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that's way too fast. So you have these different constituencies.

Host: It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long lasting way, as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. 10 years is not nothing, but really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of that was killed off?

Charles Mann: It's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise. I've heard people say maybe nuclear was just bound to be the state. In that case, that was a very successful case of regulatory capture in which the opponents of the technology successfully created this crazy situation.

Charles Mann: One of the weird things about nuclear stuff, this is not actually in the book. I wrote a whole long section about it and cut it out because I felt like it was just too much in the weeds. If you have a coal plant, they have environmental rules. The rules are based on a threshold principle: you set a safe threshold for the emission of particulates and other things, and as long as you're below that threshold, you're fine.

Charles Mann: Nuclear power has a thing for its main type of pollution, which is radiation. It's called the linear no-threshold model. It says that you have to reduce radiation to the maximum extent practicable. That is set by essentially, if your nuclear power is way cheaper than coal power, which it is, that means you have more profits so you can spend more money on reducing it. You're going ever further on the road to diminishing returns.

Charles Mann: So you have a completely different regulatory standard for nuclear in this country than you do for coal. You have this bizarre fact that coal power plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants do, because of the residual radiation in the coal that's dug up from underneath the earth. There you have a very strange case of regulatory capture, a completely inconsistent set of safety standards across different parts of the same industry. The empirical question is, how common is that? Or is this a weird thing that's happened to nuclear?

Host: Yeah.

Host: Okay, so assume you're in the 1960s, and you are a philanthropic donor who is interested. Let's say you're the 1960s version of an effective altruist. You're interested in doing the most good possible. In retrospect, it's clear that you should have funded Borlaug. Let's just say his work depends on your funding. How could you have identified work like that? Is there some criteria that is broadly applicable where you could have identified his work in Mexico?

Charles Mann: That's a really good question. That's a greatest good for greatest number question. To do that, you would have to say, what are the biggest problems facing the planet? If you're William MacAskill or somebody like that, you say all lives are equal. What is the thing that's most affecting the most number of lives? In that case, it's probably clean drinking water. I think that's the biggie.

Charles Mann: That means funding primarily urban infrastructure for water, and setting up some kind of foundation or independent agency that's insulated from government to actually keep those water systems going. That would be my answer. You would try to figure out what are the bare necessities, what's killing more people than anything else. In 1960, it's probably food and water. The Food and Agriculture Organization, once they get interested in Borlaug, actually does a pretty good job of promoting it. There's the creation of the CGIAR system. It could always use more. Water is completely neglected. I would channel it towards water.

Host: Interesting. Okay.

Host: I want to name two trends, and I want to know what you think these two imply for the debate between wizards and prophets in the future. One of the trends is declining researcher productivity in terms of how many new important advancements each researcher is able to make. There's evidence that shows that this is like exponentially decaying.

Charles Mann: I think that's wrong. The reason is that in the areas I'm familiar with, there are two things going on. One is in particle physics, it's harder and harder to make discoveries because the penalty of your own success is pushing harder and harder into things. To really get where you're going, it's just incredibly expensive. That's a natural phenomenon. It's not anything really to worry about, because what do you want to do? Undo the past 50 years of success in particle physics? People like Murray Gell-Mann could do a huge amount because we didn't know anything. You're seeing plain old diminishing returns.

Charles Mann: The second thing, and I think this is important, is that it feels like the vast majority of agricultural research is in a bunch of narrow areas: wheat, rice, maize, and so forth. There are all kinds of alternative crops that are hardly looked at and could be really important, particularly in a time of climate change when we are going to have to have a much more resilient and varied agricultural system to deal with the uncertainties.

Charles Mann: There's hardly any research done in agroforestry. All those crops are essentially wild. Except for William Powell looking at chestnut, there's practically no real genetic research into increasing tree crop productivity. There's also not nearly enough research in things like cassava, where you could do a huge amount. When I talk to people, I always say, go to these other crops. They're really important, and they're going to be even more important in the future. There's virtually no research on them, and you can make giant strides rather than being the person trying to increasingly optimize wheat, something that's already been optimized by 10,000 people.

Charles Mann: Part of it is that there is this channeling of people into fields that are already well trodden. I think you can see that in many, many areas of research. That would be a partial answer to that question.

Host: I see. So I was going to ask if there's declining research productivity, maybe there's fewer rabbits who can just keep pulling out of the hat like Borlaug did. But let me just ask instead, with regards to increasing the productivity of trees in order to potentially deal with climate change. In the book you speculate about C4 photosynthesis. That's just an example of the kind of thing you could do. What is the status of that? Are you optimistic about that?

Charles Mann: They're plugging away. It's a huge, difficult problem, but it's extraordinarily interesting. To get something like C4 rice would be an absolutely gigantic increase in productivity. Even in drylands areas, there's this method of agriculture used in West Africa and places like northern Mexico, which is silvopastoral, where you have ruminants, cows, and trees. The two create a system that is way easier on the land, uses way less water, and is almost as productive as annual crops. Almost no research has gone into that. That would be another example of a kind of thing you could do that I would argue would have a much greater impact than the person trying to get the latest flavor of cherry flavored nose drops, which is what a huge amount of research is in.

Host: There have been people speculating recently that environmental contaminants are leading to a host of bad outcomes in health in the West, especially obesity. How plausible do you think this is?

Charles Mann: I always wonder about the mechanism. What would be the mechanism that these tiny trace amounts of these compounds have? How come as our environment has generally gotten cleaner, obesity has risen? I'm immediately skeptical of this.

Charles Mann: One of the issues here is that you're dealing with problems that are on the very limits of our ability to measure them. If you're looking for these things, they have very long-term effects. Whatever they are, how are you going to actually ascertain that? People who make very strong claims based on effects without a mechanism that are at the very limits of our ability to measure, that just doesn't seem all that promising to me. It's not impossible, but the claims you see, I think, how could they possibly know that?

Host: One of these people, they're good friends of mine, they're anonymous bloggers on the internet, and they set up something called the Potato Diet. It was like a four-week study. I thought you might have interesting thoughts on this given the chapters in your book that were dedicated to the humble potato and its impact on the world. They only ate potatoes for four weeks. As you talk about in the book, potatoes have a bunch of micronutrients. They're weirdly good for you if you're going to do that.

Charles Mann: Use potatoes.

Host: People lost a lot of weight. Is this something you would have expected? What do you think of this recapitulating Irish history?

Charles Mann: The Irish history is both analogous and not analogous. It is true they ate nothing but, but those people were super vigorously physically exercising because they were out in the fields with really poor tools. It's a really different situation from 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 fields. The epidemiological environment is so crazy different. All those people in Ireland only lived to the age of 40 anyway.

Charles Mann: There's a whole host of studies that show that people who take extreme diets, almost always they work. Nothing but beans, nothing but this, and people lose a lot of weight in the short term. It's really difficult to show that it's possible to keep it off and possible for people to maintain these kinds of diets for long periods of time.

Host: Right. I remember that part of the book where you have that passage from Adam Smith where he's commenting on how all these Irish people, they only eat potatoes, but all of them seem so healthy and beautiful.

Charles Mann: Right, well, they're also out in the fields and not in London. Adam Smith is looking at Edinburgh and places like that, which are the most unhealthy places on the planet.

Host: Say you have no discount rate, so you think future people matter exactly as much as current people. Does that shift you more towards the prophet side or the wizard side? Not in absolute terms, but from where you're starting out.

Charles Mann: I have to say I'm uncomfortable with that entire time reason. This is something that William MacAskill talks about. 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. There's no question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to people in 1800. The idea that we can have any other idea other than they probably want to be alive seems much more questionable than I think it does.

Charles Mann: There are two ways to look at it. The wizards say, we have an idea, they're going to want to live in this certain kind of utopia, live their longest lives, and have the maximum possible physical comfort. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. The prophets might say, we should be more epistemologically humble. We don't know what they want to do. Let's preserve as many options as possible for them. That doesn't seem crazy.

Charles Mann: I personally probably lean more to the wizards on this, but if a prophet said that to me, I wouldn't say, "Oh, you're wrong." It's the same argument about burying nuclear waste, which I also think is very powerful. We should probably not bury it in some system where it can't be gotten rid of for 10,000 years. We should just make sure we can track it for a couple hundred years, and there'll be more options for people 200 years from now than there are today.

Host: Okay. So what is wrong with the basic free market objection to the carrying capacity arguments? It 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. People will just decrease their consumption or keep it constant. With meat, people are concerned that as the developing world gets richer, people are going to eat more meat. But if it consumes 10 times the energy and the grain as just feeding them directly, that'll be represented in the price. The trend lines might be mistaken because the price of meat will increase.

Charles Mann: I think that's a very powerful argument. But the problem with it, to my mind, is that the kinds of things we care about for carrying capacity aren't things like bubble gum. They're things like food, water, and energy. Those have never, as far as I know, been governed by anything remotely resembling the free market. They aren't today. They never have been in the past.

Charles Mann: It seems to me an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if you truly had a free market for those things. But it also seems pointless because if I had to bet, I'd bet that it would be the same way it's been for the last couple thousand years, and we don't have a free market. We already have all kinds of weird distortions because of that. The tremendous amount of food that's wasted, the crazy arrangements we have for water, these ludicrous things.

Charles Mann: I have this idea you're in Texas, right? You have this thing where Texas has its own independent grid, so it can't trade energy with other states that are nearby. What the heck is that? That's really crazy. I don't mean to pick on Texas, but there are equally crazy things all over the place. The impossibility of building long distance high tension lines because various states have just arbitrarily imposed rules that make it impossible. There are all kinds of crazy things going on.

Charles Mann: I think what you're saying is very likely to be true in a system that will never exist. Unfortunately, because it's kind of a nice idea.

Host: That seems an excellent note to close on. I learned so much from the books and I learned so much from talking to you. I really enjoyed this. The books again that we talked about were *1491*, *1493*, and *The Wizard and the Prophet* for anybody interested. Is there any other place that you would like to direct viewers who might want to check out your work?

Charles Mann: Stay tuned for my book about the West, which should be coming out next year if I'm at all lucky.

Host: I'd love to have you back on again when it comes out.

Charles Mann: We can talk about Texas. It has an amazing history. One of the things I learned about was the Comanche and their role in Texas history. It's totally eye-poppingly amazing. So that's a very fun part. We can talk about your Texas roots.

Host: We definitely will. Thanks so much for coming on, Charles.

Charles Mann: Sure. Pleasure. Nice to meet you.

[Music fades in]

Host: Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could share it. This is still a pretty small podcast, so it is a huge help when any one of you shares an episode that you like. Post it on Twitter, send it to friends who you think might like it, put it in your group chats. Just let the word go forth. It helps out a ton.

Host: Many thanks to my amazing editor, Graham Bessalou, for producing this podcast, and to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode, which have helpful links. You can find them at the link in the description below. Remember to subscribe on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Cheers. See you next time.