This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main brach and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy these people talk as much as you do. Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning.
Hey, everybody, I am here right now with Charles C. Mann, the author of several books, "1491", "1493", and "The Wizard and the Prophet". These are really great books, I read all three of them. And I don't know, I think 1491 and 1493 are some of the books that I've actually read like two or three times each. And I think a lot of you listeners will know, Charles, but I'll let him introduce himself in his own words.
Well hi Razib, I'm Charles Mann, and as you said, I'm a writer, I've written for a lot of different publications. But mostly now I write books. And the ones that you mentioned are the ones that I've put out most recently, I'm now working out a book about the North American West, which is kind of a sequel or offshoot to 1491 and 1493.
Awesome. So um, you know, since you've come out with those books, you know, 10 to 15 years ago, I guess you probably started doing the research 20 years ago. Have you changed your... actually, you know, what, before we get to that, talk about what you concluded because, you know, I kind of think of it as everybody knows these books, everybody knows the revisionist conclusions, or the revisionist conclusions that are now orthodoxy. But why don't you tell tell the listeners who maybe they're too young, or you know, they just didn't encounter your books, didn't encounter your ideas, like, tell us about 1491 and 1493.
So 1491, as the title, I hope indicates, is about the Americas before Columbus. And basically, most Americans, unfortunately, to this day, are still taught in school, that there are very few Native people when we were here, they had hardly impact any impact. And so when Columbus arrived, it was for all intents and purposes, a wilderness. And I guess one way to summarize the book is that most archaeologists, anthropologists, ecologists, you know, and a whole bunch of different disciplines have done research. And in general, they concluded that there were many more people here when Columbus landed than previously believed, nobody knows the exact number, but typical numbers around 40 to 60 million that they were in... had far greater sort of technical competence. And it's typically believed, and they had much greater impact on the environment than was typically believed. The second book 1493, is really kind of an update of an absolutely amazing book by historian, the late historian Al Crosby called the Columbian Exchange, which was about the fact which he noticed and named that when Columbus came over, and the ships that followed him, the passengers on those ships, were not just human, but there was an enormous ecological exchange as well. As you know, the potato came over to Europe, the corn came over to Europe wheat, you know, cattle horses came over here, and that this had an absolutely huge impact and kind of underlay the European triumph. And in you know, I got to know Al little bit and I kept saying, No, his work has stimulated so much research, you know, he should do an updated version of it to account for the 40 years of research that we've done. And finally, he sort of said, no, no, you do it if you think it's such a good idea, and I did think was a good idea. And I did do it. And finally, the Wizard and the Prophet is, as you notice, both of those had some concern with the environment. In partly, the rise of environmental history is something that's occurred during my lifetime. And I think it's really wonderful an important thing. And this is about something I had noticed in my own research, which is that typically when people talk about the environment, there's kind of two different attitudes about it. And this spills over into discussions of environmental problems. And I had for a long time, in my own head nicknamed them wizards and prophets. And I thought of two paradigmatic figures in this is Norman Borlaug, the main person behind with we called the Green Revolution, which is the combination of high yielding seeds, you know, high intensity irrigation, and high intensity fertilizer that doubled or even tripled, grain yields, and then 60s and 70s and had an enormous impact on the entire globe. And that attitude. The idea behind that is that our environmental problems can essentially be fixed by using sort of more science and using better science, and then, almost at the exact same time as Borlaug is another fellow named William Vogt. And he is the guy who put together the idea that no, no, what's really going on is that there's these fundamental ecological limits that govern our existence that govern the planet's existence. And we surpass them to our peril. And so consequently, we don't need more, we need less, we need to cut back. And the tension between these two viewpoints plays out almost every day in the headlines. And that's what The Wizard and the Prophet is about.
Yeah. Um, so I didn't know much about Vogt.
No body does
. Yeah, I knew about Borlaug, Borlaug is I think, you know, he's one of my heroes, you know, I come out of a genetics background. And I'm not a plant geneticist, myself, but I have a lot of plant genetic friends. And, you know, I come, my family's from Bangladesh. That's where I was born. Borlaug has made a huge difference, I think, in the lives of billions of Asians. But first, I want to talk about 1491, 1493, this sort of thing. So 1491, we are, as we are recording, we are the tail and hopefully, of the of the COVID 19 pandemic. Can you talk about disease, and why that wasn't a sign from God. But it was actually unfortunately, just like the working out of natural processes in the new world. When the afro... when the Europeans arrived along with the Africans they brought Well,
One way to think about that is that all the people in the Americas descended from a very small group of people who made it, you know, from Siberia, the founding population of the Americas was tiny in comparison to the founding population of Europe, and Asia and Africa. And so what they brought, for better or worse is what stayed there. And they did not bring a whole host of diseases with them, because it came through an arctic environment. And they're a small group. And these are, by the way, both genetic and physical diseases. And so all for these 1000s of years that they were here, it was really, it wasn't a disease free paradise, but they didn't have smallpox, they didn't have influenza, they didn't have measles, they didn't have malaria, they didn't have any of the familiar communicable diseases. And so when Europeans came over, it was as if they brought them over here, for the first time, the populations were immunologically naive. And they also didn't have any of the sort of social conventions that people in Europe and Asia and Africa had developed, they didn't have quarantine, notably. And so when Columbus and his successors came, it was as if all the suffering and death that had occurred in the previous 10, or 15,000 years in Europe and Asia and Africa, were packed into about 150 years in North, South, and Central America. And the result was the largest demographic catastrophe in human history, and goes a long way, in my view, and I think most historians view to explaining why small groups are really relatively poorly equipped Europeans at the end of a very long and unsteady supply chain to survive and even thrive in ecosystems that are completely unfamiliar to them.
Yeah, so from what I remember, both the fall the Aztec and the Inca empires, which are the two ones we know, were kind of presaged or more concurrent with, you know, plagues, right?
Yes. Especially smallpox. I mean, you know, because smallpox has been eradicated, we don't really, you know, typically understand what a terrible disease it was. But from what we can understand, last place that really sort of ran rampant was 19th century, um, South Asia, and their English doctors are recorded, you know, fatality rates among adults of 40% or so. I mean, it was just a terrible, terrible disease. And when Cortes came with him, actually, not in his particular expedition, but there's a through complication of history. There's a second part of his, what became his expedition that came a little bit later, just a couple months later. And there's apparently a guy in there with smallpox, and it raced ahead. And it - the central Mexico is, at that point, one of the most densely populated places on Earth, I mean, estimates of its population go all the way up to like 50 million people. I think that's probably... most people think that's too high, but that gives you some idea of what we're talking about. And the impact was just devastating. And Cortes, you know, was was a huge help that, you know, 40% of the Army, and much of the governing superstructure of the Aztec empire, had collapsed because they'd all died. And then this same epidemic was first put together in the late 60s by a guy named Dobbins, went all the way through Central America somehow jumped, you know, across Panama, and went into another super densely populated part of the world and that was Peru, and Pizarro and his folks arrived just a few years after that into an empire where the emperor had been killed by smallpox. and also his successor and his designated, you know, sort of second successor, which had led to a civil war which he was able to hijack.
Yeah. And so, you know, obviously Europeans have their own ideas, you know, God, you know, this sort of thing. And the modern era, I think people assumed it was technology. So, you know, they're encountering people who had not entered really what we would call the Metal Ages, you know, maybe they're Neolithic late Neolithic stage. And they these newcomers show up with swords, armor, and horses, but what you're pointing out here is, there were just massive demographic collapse all over the place. And it's easy to take over, when there is demographic collapse. One thing that I do wonder about,
Let me, let me offer a suggestion, one of the really striking things when you look at the accounts, the horses made a huge difference. Protecting these are armies that fought on foot, right. And so horses go so fast, that and are, you know, are so massive, that these - that you have to develop an entire strategy, which have been known in Europe since the time of the Greeks at least, and how to deal with them, you kind of bunch up and you have these massed, you know, people you can stop horses that way. The - the the people in central Mexico, the people and they had to learn this on the fly. And they did eventually, but they had an enormous disadvantage there. Curiously, the guns and the swords were less important, much, much less important. And in fact, if you read the Chronicles, the Spaniards are really impressed by the Aztec weaponry, which is this thing called a macuahuitl. I'm not sure about the pronunciation, I don't speak nahuatl. And that was this kind of flat club with obsidian edges all the way around. And if you read Bernal Diaz, he talks about how a single blow with these very heavy broadswords with the super sharp obsidian edges to disembowel a horse and that kind of thing. So yeah, the horse in the disease, I think steel was less important than you would think. And particularly the cannons, they didn't have very many Cortes, and they all rusted.
I see, well,
it's just note,
we're not we're not gonna tell Jared [Dimond]to rename his book. Let's just just keep that just just germs and horses.
Or germs, germs and horses.
Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned earlier how the societies are a bit as if they're Neolithic. And, you know, I'm just trying to get a good sense here. How would you describe I mean, you know, you're involved in this, you know, literature for a while, like, how would you describe the civilizations and societies that the Spaniards met in the, you know, late 15th century, early 16th century? To people today? Like, I mean, what would they like, and what are the analogies here
are some ways are quite similar. I mean, the lack of horses, which, you know, occurred, just, you know, not through anything that they had done, it was a huge difference in that communication was much more difficult. And so, things tended to be done on a smaller scale, simply because you had to have people walking everywhere in place, like Central Mexico is full of mountains, you know, the things it was quite difficult to get get around. You know, nonetheless, they did have these highly centralized states, that were, in some ways, quite similar to the one in Spain, there is a you know, Spain was a basically a theocracy, in which the king was, you know, sort of anointed by God and, and the Pope, and in which Christianity was the official, you know, state religion, people who were, you know, you know, seen as bad as, you know, Muslims, Muslims who would fought against it, or, you know, conversly, those people who are faking their Christianity were routinely sacrificed in public executions, just, you know, in enormous numbers, and you get to Central Mexico, and you have, it's quite interesting, you have a society that has... in which technology has developed very, very differently. very crudely in sort of, in a summary way you could say that there are ahead in biological sciences and behind in physical sciences. And so you had these, you know, enormous effort in an in very skillful effort in ecological management are far superior in anything that the Europeans had done. This society is centered on this huge artificial lake, the cities involved. There's these three large cities that are formed the Aztec empire infact historians now typically called the Triple Alliance, because Aztec is sort of a made up name. So I'm going to do that from now on the Triple Alliance has got these three large cities, the largest of which is Tenochtitlan, which kind of Venice it's much about three times bigger it's a bunch of islands and this artificially contoured Lake, bear in mind that the Spaniards at the time are still thinking in terms of Aristotle for their engineering, so that the kind of engineering that was done to transform this boggy area into a lake was absolutely beyond them. And, you know, this, the Cortes and all the people who were, you know, thought of them is, as essentially as equals, although they thought they were bad, because they, they weren't Christians. And that's more or less how the, you know, the triple alliance, I think, thought these guys as these people who came from an equal society and had these horses, and were therefore a formidable force. And so then you had this momentous encounter. And something similar happened in Europe, one of the things that the Spaniards don't get enough credit for his that they're both Cortez and Pizarro were in certain ways very adroit politically. And the alliance of the Triple Alliance and the Inca Empire were both extremely unstable politically, the Mexica, which are the people lived in Tenochtitlan, are kind of throwing around there, you know, weight too much. And so the other two members of the alliance were really unhappy with them. And what Cortes did was provided an excuse for, you know, the, to create a civil war. And then he was able to ally with this other independent nation Tlaxcala, which is kind of like a republic. That was that have been fighting this thing forever. And so you essentially had the Spaniards riding on top of an absolutely enormous inter ethnic conflict. And the same thing kind of happened in Pizarro, there was a civil war between two potential successors for the throne, and Pizarro was able to seize control of one of the wings of the of the Civil War and eventually go into this seizure, so that there is a real sort of complex mixture of motives there. But throughout all these societies, you know, the both the indigenous accounts and the Spanish accounts, there's a striking similarity. Now, we sort of say, you know, colonialism is bad, and it shouldn't have done this stuff. But it's you can I have never read a single word of blame. In any of the indigenous accounts, they sort of said, This is what happens people do this stuff.
Interesting. And so um, just out of curiosity, how would you contrast the conquest of the Inca? Because I mean, I think that, you know, we in America, I don't know, like, it's just one. I mean, they're kind of seen as the same thing, in a way, like just a repetition.
The Inca were these really rough customers, okay. They were not, you know, nice. And they have this very aggressively expanding empire that is extraordinary that they're able to hold it together. I mean, the sort of Mercator maps we have in our heads, you know, at least I do, don't, you know, make South America look littler than it actually is. And so you're dealing with an empire that had nothing but people to, you know, communicate that stretch from a distance like Stockholm to Cairo. I mean, it's absolutely amazing that they could have a rigidly centralized state. And one of the ways they did this was by taking these subject populations and pitting them against each other, and moving them around. And to so that, you know, your entire group of people would be taken from point A, and told that they had to move to point B. And they did this by to make sure that lots of people were put next to other groups that didn't get along. And this way that the Inca would be the arbiter of this. And it's quite familiar if you read the history of how Stalin people like that ruled, which was to, you know, divide and, and make sure that your subjects were permanently divided and fighting each other and living in this state of anxiety and suspicion and fear. And people don't like it. And so when the Spaniards came, there is a tremendous hope that you know, let's get rid of these guys. How bad can the Spaniards be? The answere is - pretty bad.
Yeah, yeah. They found out they found out, you know, I do want to like talk about some of the other things from 1491, in particular that I really recall. Amazon, we think today of the Amazon is virgin rainforest, and all this stuff. And the reality is, there's indigenous people, you know, uncontacted people that are there. But, you know, you have, I don't know, you have a very, very interesting chapter in that book about the Amazon that's kind of stuck with me. And it's one of those facts you kind of tell it a party, about how everything we know about the Amazon is actually kind of a little deceptive. So could you get onto that?
Sure. The Amazon is this basically is a symbol of wilderness, right? You You know, this empty, tropical forest, that's, you know, that's untouched nature. And that we have to protect, because there's this whole story of ecological fragility, which you may have learned if you took ecology 101, you know, 15 or 20 years ago. And this is the idea that the soil in the Amazon is extremely poor, which it is, by and large, and as a result, all the nutrients are in the canopy in the vegetation in the enormously thick vegetation. And if you clear the canopy, the rain and the sun, bake the poor soil into something resembling brick, and you completely destroy the productive capacity of it. And it turns out, while this is, you know, not completely wrong. Nonetheless, people are extremely clever, and have figured out ways to to live there that essentially involve manipulating entire landscapes and cover and so there's at least 160 different tree crops that are in the Amazon. And they're present in such a great number as to make it fairly clear that over the millennia, the people manipulated vast swaths of the Amazon forest and turn it into what you know, they call an edible forest, a kind of a giant permaculture type garden. It's a really interesting way of farming. And something I think that has has a lot to offer, possibly as future people really start to understand the way it works. And the result is that there was considerably more populous than than people thought. And in fact, in the eastern part of the Amazon in the far western part of the Amazon, which are the parts that are most most accessible, archeologists have found evidence of very large populations. The main tributary on the east side, sort of the first one you encounter that's a big one is the Xingu and a bunch of Archaeologists from Brazil and University of Florida led by a guy named Heckenberger, have found these large dispersed cities, you know, sort of dotting the entire river basin, quite interestingly, they're very similar to a type of model city that was proposed by the socialist visionaries. In the late 19th century in England, this is terrific book called "Garden Cities of the Future". And damn if they don't look very similar and work in similar ways. Then over in the West, there's these hundreds of very, very large geometric figures that have been carved into the into the ground hundreds, if not 1000s, covering an extremely large area from the far western part of the Amazon, and the - and the sort of lower basin of Bolivia, typically called the area, especially the area called the Pando there, and this two, seems like it must have had very large populations. And there's beginning to be more and more evidence of people, again, modifying the landscape in this large way to take advantage of the seasonal snow melt that comes there from from the Andes to grow impressive numbers of crops. And so the Amazon is looking more and more like a human artifact. Boy, it was a long winded answer. Sorry about that.
No, but I mean, that's, I mean, that's a really weird and shocking thing to say, for a lot of people because the Amazon is untouched nature par excellence for, for kid that, like me, grew up in the 80s and 90s. That's what we were told that, you know, that's why we need to protect the Amazon. And what you're trying to say is the modern Amazon, I mean, the Amazon that we know, is an artifact of a massive die off of humans that had Terraformed it - you know reshaped it?
Yeah. It's, it's not wild. It's feral. You know, there's a, there's a big distinction between that. And, in fact, one of the striking things about that there's a... is the suggestion that we need to have that landscape inhabited, so that we can keep maintaining it in its, you know, hyper productive state. And one of the things that I you know, personally feel is extremely distressing is this movement to create these parks, in which you empty them, you get rid of the people who are there, and they're typically called squatters. Right? And, in fact, they're the descendants of the people who actually made this place.
Yeah, yeah. That's, it's like so weird. So weird, you know, some of the same can apply to North America. Right? So, you know, there's a stylized fact again, like the we grew up with here in the states, like, oh, well, you know, the Europeans came there, these vast forests and a squirrel can jump all the way from New England to Central Indiana, from tree to tree or something. Can you talk about, you know, why that's kind of misleading and also the role of fire? And, you know, just all the other things like the arrival of all the Eurasian animals at the end of the last ice age?
Yes. So this landscape again, that we think of is, you know, quote unquote natural was in fact elaborately shaped by the first inhabitants of the Americas. And so, you know, sort of going from east to west, we now know that, you know, most of the western forests were regularly burned. And in fact, our ideas that they were quote unquote, wildernesses led to these creation of these vast areas that aren't burned, which are now we're learning why they were regularly burned, because the buildup of fuel is such that if you don't burn the undergrowth, you know, routinely, you end up with these mega fires that are truly disruptive, then the Great Plains, again, the Great Plains are much smaller now than they used to be. And that's because we aren't burning them as much as roughly half of the Great Plains 40%, something like that seems to have been created by indigenous burning, and then over an Eastern forest, it, you also had these regular maintenance type type burns. But along with that came a really massive replanting, one of the striking things is that - you know, from what we can tell, both archaeologically and from, you know, the reports of really naturalist, something like a quarter of the trees in the eastern forest were chestnuts. And then another quarter were mast trees that mast trees are nut bearing trees, like, you know, beech nuts, and hazelnuts and all that kind of thing, acorns and, and hickory. And they when you let these areas re, you know, regrow naturally, that's just not what happens. Now, in the indicated, the indication seems to be that, again, the Eastern forest was tremendously reshaped, so that you would have these new sources of food just everywhere. And what that was, was, you know, you could be, you know, Hodinöhsö:ni an Iroquois guy growing your farm. And then, you know, maybe had a bad year, but in the in the woods was all these chestnuts and chestnuts, for example, are unbelievably productive. That sort of folk rule of thumb was that a single large chestnut, would produce enough chestnut flour and nuts to feed a family for a year, obviously, a very monotonous diet, but a way better than than starving. And that so that there was this entire kind of artificially maintained landscape, that, that, you know, the first Europeans came in, and because the form of farming was so different, they thought it was, you know, wild and a waste and wilderness and all that, but it was anything but
yeah, I mean, can you talk about so I think a lot of Americans think of, I mean, we know about maize, and how they taught the pilgrims and all that. But we think of I don't know that the natives of the eastern woodlands, as hunter gatherers as foragers as quote, unquote, "savages", you know, I mean, I think this is partly due to just, you know, how the Europeans, how the English, etc, depicted them, but can you talk about them? And in terms of how there's, you know, I mean, there's, there's a lot more there than, you know, what we're taught?
Sure. I mean, you know, people are people, right, they, they discover stuff, they make stuff, they invent stuff. And the wonderful thing is different people invent different kinds of things. But very definitely the human footprint was very large here. I'm speaking to you from Central Massachusetts, where I live. And if you look at the first accounts of Europeans, they're Verrazano came in the 1520s. And he landed, one place he landed was Rhode Island and in Bristol Bay there, and they marched inland. And they marched. I think they said for 20 leagues through which is 60 miles or there abouts through cornfields before they found trees. And they reported it all the way all along the New England coast. Were these, you know, huge fields. And this was one of the reasons that actually later European settlement was successful, because there is a disease came through here and first epidemic was in about 1618, a couple years before the, the pilgrims and so they didn't actually have to cut down any trees, which is a tremendous amount of work. Instead, they could just take over indigenous cornfields. And then the entire landscape, there's a terrific book about this William Cronon, classic, called "Changes in the Land", describing how all of New England, you know, the landscape was manipulated to create what they what the botanists called semi-domesticates. And what you do is you after you've cleared the land, it's, you know, it's a lot of work to do that. And so especially if you don't have steel tools, so what you do is you manage the succession, so that you know what grows up is stuff that you want and so it's you know, Typically berries, or medicinal plants or tobacco, and then you burn out. But you don't want to destroy the entire forest because that's where your game are. And so you burn that every year to create, to entice game to come in, and your garden, there's also sort of like bait. And so what you have is the this process of community farming an entire landscape, and within a bunch of technology to make that work, you know, so you don't want to you don't have horses and wheels so that roads are really not worth making. Instead, you use the rivers, which there are lots of here. And so they developed the birch bark canoe, which I don't know if you've ever been in one, but it's an absolutely amazing thing. So much so that Europeans promptly stopped using your English, who came over here with their Coracles promptly stopped using them and started asking native people to make their boats for them. Similarly, you know, when you're not walking on roads, or you're walking through the woods, a moccasin is a way better use than a European shoe. And so there's all these different kinds of things that they invented that Europeans not being idiots took them up on.
Yeah. So for listeners who are subscribed to my substack app, I do have a piece from middle of the summer of 2021, about Finn-dians. And basically, Finns from New... from Sweden. What was that Sweden because Sweden ruled Finland, when they first arrived in the New World, some commentators or some observers were talking about how the quote Swedes who were are all Finns, really, really kind of, they got a lot of the native traditions because they come from the same birch bark belt, and they're kind of backwoods men. And it was, it was very different than the experience of like, you know, the more urbane English, shall we say, and that still persist to some extent in northern Minnesota, the Western Peninsula of Michigan, where are their indigenous native people? And a lot of Finnish immigrants, the two groups actually mix pretty well. It just shows kind of the important role of I think, ecology and shaping people's culture.
There's a really, Bernard Bailyn, the recently passed away as a great historian at Harvard, has a terrific chapter about the quote unquote Finns in his book, The barbarous years. And yeah, even though there weren't that many, they really had a strikingly interesting story, what they did over here, so I'm delighted that you covered this.
Yeah, um, so yeah, Baylands books are great. I really recommend that. But yeah, it's, um, it's pretty interesting, just like how we think things are so alien people are so alien. But in the reality, they're, they're kind of doing similar things all over the world with different ways, maybe different labels. But um, it's not that different. But I mean, in terms of being alien, and different. I want to like switch to another topic of something that I want to talk to you about what new things have happened since, you know, 1491 and 1493. Came out, but and like, let you just like offer your opinion. But I do want to ask, since 1491, was written, you know, we've talked about this online, Clovis first is done. There's a really strong suspicion that there were people here before the last glacial maximum. Yeah.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. Sorry. I just it's an amazing thought. Yeah. So long ago.
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like, how does that impact anything that you wrote in 1491, is 1491, just the story of the Clovis people, their descendants are the recent ancestors of Clovis people, because this is what I'm wondering, the Native American people, the indigenous people of the New World, they reshaped the ecology radically. That's what I got from 1491. That's what I get from other things. That's what we kind of know from megafaunal extinctions. So for the listeners, ground sloths, like huge grounds loss, disappear in the new world, about like all the order of 10,000 years ago, as you know, the indigenous people are expanding. They disappear in Puerto Rico, I think, like 6000 years ago, or 6000 years ago, or 6000 BC, one of the two, but it's basically when humans arrived in in the islands, right? So that's telling you the connection between humans and megafauna extinctions. But if this if these new theories are correct, and I think most people now believe that they are correct, there were people here 25,000 years ago, those people didn't end up killing anything. Well, what's going on here? Do you have any thoughts?
Yes, I do. Actually, it's funny that you asked that. Or maybe not. I'm thinking about issuing a revised edition of 1491. And this is one of the one of the questions. What do you do about this sort of overkill idea? And for listeners who don't know, I should probably explain the background of this, which is, for a long time, there's a kind of a very neat theory that when the ice from the glaciers in the last Ice Age melted fully, the two big sheets pulled apart, there's two giant ice sheets. And the edge of them was along the eastern edge of the Canadian Rockies. And so the edge is of course what melt, they pull apart, And there's this sort of moment, not actually that long, when you could still be on Beringia, which was the part the connection that existed during the ice ages between Siberia and and Alaska is a very shallow part of the ocean there, it's only 60 feet deep in most places. And so when the ice ages, you know, all the water from the ice ages piled up with a glaciers, it exposed the shelf, and people live there for 1000s of years. And you could go directly from Eastern Asia for a few 100 years across this, quote, ice free quarter. And that is how the Americas were settled about 13,000 years ago, at roughly the same time, a huge number of very large species disappeared in the Americas, and it's called a megafauna extinction. And so it all seemed to fit together that, you know, the ice melted this ice record or peered, this humans came in with this lethal new technology of weather called Clovis Points, these very, very sharp spear points, and they killed all these naive prey. And unfortunately, it's all fallen apart. Because it was such a nice theory. The latest evidence strongly suggests that people were here during the last glacial maximum, which is, when the ice was really piled up high, It was extremely cold, it couldn't possibly across the the ice free quarter, therefore they had to have come here by boat. And they also must have existed for like 10,000 years with the same megafauna without killing them off. And so it's sort of weird to think, well, they existed together for 10,000 years, and then they suddenly went into a killing frenzy? It's, it's odd,
the spirit moves them.
Move them on the on the other hand, it's hard to imagine what else could have killed them. And the strongest argument is always been that it was the climate at the end of the last ice age. You know, the climate changes killed them. But that's always had a very powerful objection, which is that there are numerous ice ages, you know, they have ice waxed and waned. And we have no evidence of any die offs at the end of the other ice ages. So what was special about this one? So I would argue that right now, it's really up in the air, and you end up having to make very clever arguments, if you're going to support one side or the other.
Yeah, I mean, you know, as we're recording, I mean, probably for the next couple of years, maybe the next decade. This is like a time of transition, people are figuring it out paradigms are shifting. You know, models are fitting, we don't have any whole genomes, any really genome wide evidence, we have some Coprolites from 14 from Paisley caves in Oregon, 14,000 years ago, I think, or 14,500, something like that, you know, they look kind of like East Eurasian, exactly what you'd expect. And some of the listeners know that there's evidence of like, you know, Australia Melanesian related ancestry in South America.
And that's really exciting, isn't it? That's really interesting
It's exciting. But like, nobody knows what's going on. I mean, you know, I know the author of the first paper that published and he, they checked for months, because they just thought it had to be an artifact. And then they thought, Well, maybe it's some weird artifact with modern populations only found a Brazilian sample from 10,000 years ago that had the exact same thing. So it's real. And no one knows why. I mean, it's this is science, right? Yeah. Science in the wild, untamed, confusing, exciting. Totally mystifying. So
Confirmed. It's been confirmed, you know, this is not wrong. But it's very hard to understand one of the things I'm going to, in a small way, Pat, myself on the back, is that the - I met when I was reading 1491. So this is, you know, 17 years ago or so. The the Brazilian geneticists who was looking for this, and he made such a strong case, for this, that I included it in the book as something that to watch out for that might be real. And lo and behold, it did turn out to be real. Nobody understands it, but it's, it would just be extraordinary if it was wrong at this point.
Yeah, yeah. People have checked every which way, and like, the results are correct, genetically. Now, why? How? like, that's a whole different question. And that's what we're getting at. So, um, in terms of 1491, you know, it's been, I don't know, probably on the order of 20 years since you started really thinking deeply about this, like, what's changed and how have you updated your views?
Okay, well, in general, I'm, you know, for better or worse - the sort of the gist of things, I think, I haven't changed. There's some things that you know, when I think about a possible rewriting for it for an addition, I would I would alter. So let me talk about things that in my view, I got wrong. I talked about the epidemics. But the and, I talked about these big sweeping epidemics, but most people who are killed, epidemics are killed by smaller localized ones. And they that they are spread out further in time. So I there's there's an error or an emphasis there that I would like to like to fix. One thing I didn't talk about in either book, and I very much and I know that clear in the last few years of scholarship is the amount of indigenous slavery both before Columbus and especially after, it's just way more than anybody had guessed. It's been looked at for the first time. And the there's a book by Andres Resendez, called "the other slavery" that sort of broke the dam. There's a new book out this year by Aaron Woodruff that talks about slavery in the Caribbean, there was just an absolute ton of it. And that's something I would want to emphasize more. When I talked about in 1493, I talked a lot about how important the discovery of silver was, I still think is very important. I overemphasized how much of it was in Peru, even though there was larger, there's a huge amount of Mexico, I should have talked about that. One of the things I don't know what to do with iis Matthew Restall, very interesting historian, a couple years back published a new look at the conquest of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec empire, and proposed a completely different reading of it based on nahuatl sources. That's really wild. And like that new book by David Graber and David Wingrove, that's just come out a couple of weeks ago. That's something you're gonna that's going to, I have to reckon with one of the things that they both convinced me is that Tlaxcala, which is the the state that allied with Cortez, I just got - I described completely wrong. They, I just, I had relied on other people who also described her completely wrong, some least company. And there's new evidence about the predecessor civilization Teotihuacan, which is just completely fascinating, I would like to include. So those are some of the things I do. I would also like to say that the LIDAR findings in - the use of LIDAR to discover stuff in Central America and in southern Mesoamerica is absolutely wonderful. One of the exciting things about archaeology is of course, they're just tremendously eager to snatch new technology. And I just love what they're what they're doing there. And they're finding an example is these footprints that came out a few weeks ago, where they discovered 21 to 23,000 year old footprints in New Mexico, you know, this just an amazing finding. And the way that they dated them is just absolutely remarkable and extraordinary. And the same thing with the way that they dated recently the Viking landing on in, in Newfoundland, with the with these tree fragments, just wonderful work. I'm a big fan, as you can tell.
Yeah, um, yeah. So yeah, the Viking thing is like, by the time people listen to us, maybe they'll have forgotten, but it's a big deal. And I want to explore that in some other venue at some point, just so people know. Well, I mean, it looks like there's a lot of details, which that's how science works. That's not entirely surprising. But the big picture, you're still standing by, in 1491. So 1493 is more about the Columbian Exchange. And yeah, I feel like that was like, okay, like, I kind of understood this, but like, you filled in a lot of the details there. And I don't know, like, I mean, have you changed any views there?
No, um, one of the things that's really been kind of disappointing to me in, in, in a way is the lack of really new information. There's a ton of scientific research going on, about the - the archaeology, and a lot of those same techniques, in my view, could be applied to more recent stuff and in historical archaeology, and hasn't happened as much. You know, we it would be really interesting to know when... So one of the arguments of 1493 is that the Columbian Exchange that I mentioned, had a huge impact in Asia. And it's the scholarship and China is - is there, and we understand that, you know, China's always had this real problem with feeding itself. And, you know, in geographic terms, it's pretty clear why it doesn't have any water. China's got 20% of the world's population, give or take About six or 7% of the world's above ground freshwater. And it's all concentrated into these two river systems. There's no big lakes in China, you know, more than half of it is desert. So it's kind of not surprising that they've, they've had trouble feeding themselves, you know, - they've drawn the short straw, and these dryland crops like maize come in, and also the potato, and the sweet potato and the absolutely transform Chinese agriculture. And they also cause huge environmental problems as these previously unformed areas are farmed. And it would be really nice. There's these general accounts of it from court documents, but we should be able to know from the kind of work that's being done elsewhere in archaeology, when did the Han, you know, move out there? When did they start really knocking down those those mountains and building those terraces and so forth? You go there, and the answers they give you are obviously ridiculous. You know, when I went to I couldn't believe it when I went to Northwest China to look at all the Loess Plateau. And people there told me Oh, yeah, we've been growing corn here for 1000s of years. And I heard that in universities, and it's ridiculous. Similarly, the
they've been growing maize for 5000 years. Charels.
Yeah. Surely, in India, you hear the same kind of thing. And you think like, damn, guys, get with a stick, we, you know, how did these things happen? When did they come in? What impact did they have? You know, you should be able to trace this, and you should be, and it would have a lot to do with, with your own history, and the history of the movement of peoples. I mean, it's important stuff, and interesting stuff. So that is that it's a little disappointing. There's not, as so far as I can tell much scholarship there for me to update. And I'm just kind of surprised by it.
Well, you know, hopefully some will be listening and maybe read a grant application because, you know, there's there's people interested in all sorts of topics. But you're right. It is weird how sometimes people just ignore or neglect certain areas due to fashion or sometimes its ideological, who knows. But so let me ask you about your latest book, The Wizard and the Prophet like, I knew I knew who the Wizard is, you know, Borlaug. The Prophet is this guy with a kind of a, an old fashioned, I don't know, like, it's like a 20th century type name, William Vogt, you know, and he was an ecologist and ornithologist. So when I first got the wizard and the Prophet. I didn't like, I don't think, I don't know, if you were an article about it, or whatever. I assumed it was gonna be about Borlaug. And then I actually had assumed it was gonna be about Paul Ehrlich. And obviously, it wasn't, it was about Vogt. So can you talk about this guy and why he's important. And I feel like, you know, there's a lot of like forgotten, you know, conservationists. I don't wanna say Malthusians, but you know, people like, you know, in this vein in the mid to early part of the 20th century, and I think they've been forgotten for various reasons, but can you can you get into that?
Sure. So, Vogt, the reason I picked him is that he is the guy who put together what I think are the essential intellectual, the essential intellectual frame and framework, excuse me, of the modern environmental movement. And prior to Vogt, who was who was, you know, born before the First World War and active in the 1930s 40s, and 50s, especially the environment referred to, you know, a local area, you know, you would talk about a forest environment or something like that. And it was something that was seen as acting on people. So if you get old geography textbooks from 1910, they'll talk about how, in the tropics, people are very innervated because of the tropical forest environment, which is hot and wet, and so forth. And what Vogt did is said that sort of stretch these ideas? And he said, No, there is something called -The- environment, right. And it's hard to believe that this idea, that seems sort of like this fundamental part of our makeup was invented by a guy but it really was in it was invented by him, and that there's something called -the environment-. And then he took another idea from ecology and which is this idea of a carrying capacity? And that is that each one this comes from people like Aldo Leopold, and originally refers to as you might guess, you know, shipping, so you know, how much stuff can you put in a boat before the boat capsizes and then people like Aldo Leopold in the in the 20s. And 30s started taking it to say, Well, how many horses can you graze on a particular meadow, and that's the carrying capacity and Vogt stretch that it like taffy and said that Earth has a carrying capacity and fundamental to this idea is that there's only so much there's a limit. And if you exceed it, you'll get in terrible trouble. And there's been, there's all these sort of ecological parable type stuff written by people like Aldo Leopold, about how, you know, we overgrazed this, this this meadow, and are we you know, and it was destroyed forever. And there's this sort of fundamental idea is in the background of a lot of ecological thought and Vogt, sort of weaponized it if you like, and put it in, made it into the fundamental idea of the modern environmental movement. And it's been upgraded since then. And so you have people talking about planetary boundaries, that there's these 11 or 12, planetary boundaries. And these things will, will, if we exceed them, you know, we're all we're all in deep, deep trouble. And so I wanted to kind of explore this because I think this idea is tremendously important to the modern world, because the environmentalism that Vogt started is really the only successful ideology that has come out of the 20th century. And it's tremendously powerful. I'm not making a negative, it's not a negative or positive comment. I just think it's a fact.
Okay. Well, I mean, well, what other rivals would you say has come out of the 20th century? Cuz I guess communism is 19....
Right? Bathism?. There, I guess. You know, whatever, Tom Cruise's... Scientology, you know?
Yeah. Yeah, you're right. All right. So I mean, but like modern, I guess it's like, an ideology that sufficiently strong and successful. We'll forget its origins. And I feel like modern environmentalism is, you know, it's not like you read like some book about the biography of Vogt or, I mean, they might not most of them don't even know who Paul Ehrlich is, you know, they don't I mean, they're kind of vague. A modern people who will say they're environmentalist go to a protest might even be vague on the Sierra Club. It's not even about institutions. It's about kind of a worldview. Right.
Right. And, and he encapsulated that, and in fact, he transmitted it Ehrlich you know, both has said repeatedly and told me that he got the ideas to, you know, write The Population Bomb, and the ideas behind it, from listening to Vogts, lectures and reading. Vogts writing.
Yeah, yeah. So, um, I guess they, you know, I'm assuming most of the listeners will know about Norman Borlaug. But if, you know, if you don't know about Borlaug, I guess, Charles like, what do you want to tell them about Borlaug?
Well, so Borlaug, born about the same time as Vogt, also like Vogt, you know, born into poverty, on a level that's very difficult for us to imagine today, he was born in rural poverty in really, really difficult conditions. And he didn't think he was very smart, but he became the first person in his family to go to college, and graduated from from college, just as Depression began, you know, looked around, fled to graduate school and got a degree in plant pathology. And then through a very unlikely set of circumstances, he got put into this program as set up by the Rockefeller Foundation, to try to bring American biological know how, and, you know, farming know how to Mexico. And this was seen, both as a humanitarian thing, because Mexico was extraordinarily poor, again, poor in a way that it's very hard to imagine today, because very few places on Earth are as poor as, as Mexico was at that time. And also as political because Mexico was extremely unstable. There, this is right at the beginning of the Second World War, and they were afraid it was going to slide into fascism. very real fear. And they thought, well, if we can just, you know, feed everybody, then they won't become fascists. And Borlaug was a terrible choice for this. He didn't speak Spanish, he never been out of the country. He'd never done any plant breeding. He'd never worked with wheat, you could go on and on and on and list, his lack of qualifications, but thrust through in this kind of really inspiring way through sheer hard work. And did some plant breeding experiments on an absolutely massive scale. And because he didn't know what he was doing, he broke some laws of plant breeding that turned out to be incorrect. He was very, very lucky. And he bred a type of wheat and created a type of methodology for breeding wheat, that you that you could breed very productive wheat and do it in a similar way, everywhere. And when this wheat was properly irrigated, and properly fertilized, which meant a lot of irrigation and a lot of fertilization, you could double, triple, quadruple, you know, even more, the wheat yields an absolutely extraordinary burst of calories. And this exact same methodology was replicated even and this is even more important. for rice in the Philippines, in the in the 1960s, by this outfit called IRRI, the International Rice Research Institute, which I guess if there's one thing that I would hope your listeners learn from this is that the IRRI is a really important organization. And when I was growing up, you know, Asia was seen as you know, the poor man of the world. And it isn't anymore. And a huge part of that reason is that IRRI using Borlaug methods developed super productive rice, and planted it all over now something like 80% of the rice in, in Asia is grown from IRRI products. And it's just, you know, all the prosperity you see in Seoul and in Thailand, and China, and northern India, it's all based on the sort of foundation of this laboratory grown rice. It's just a remarkable event. And so that's the other thing, I think that is the big event, you know, this kind of prosperity that we have, in which for the first time, ever, so far as we know, you know, the average person on earth has enough to eat all the time is from Borlaug, you know, very directly, and the average person's belief that we are heading at the same time towards catastrophe, which I think is also practically universal is from both.
Yeah, I mean, so I would just say from a personal perspective, you know, I read The Population Bomb and the sequels in the 80s and early 90s. And I was definitely on that bandwagon. I feel like I've gotten more sanguine over the years, I think there are serious concerns. But it's, um, it's weird, because so, you know, some of the predictions that Ehrlich and others had made, the kind of would have come true if Green Revolution and other things really hadn't kicked in, or, you know, demographic transition hadn't happened. So in a way, we got lucky. But it seems like we keep getting lucky. So you know, I wanted to be very optimistic, and then, you know, COVID-19 hit, and we got out of luck. So it's just like, you never know, when you're going to get lucky or unlucky. And this is really hard to predict things.
I feel like both of them, um, you know, since I, as they're sort of biographer, and one of the things that really, by the way, was astonishing to me. I mean, Borlaug is a world historical figure, and the Green Revolution is a profoundly important event. And the fact that there's never been really serious scholarly biography of Borlaug. It's just absolutely stunning to me. I don't know why that is. And it's embarrassing kind of the me as a journalist should should have published the closest thing to it. Yeah, I that was, in fact made much harder to read, because I assume there was one out there. And it's, Oh, crap, I have to do all this primary research.
It's all on you. It's all on you. Right. So people are gonna cite you for Borlaug?
Yeah, so one of the things that they both, I think underestimated is the enormous power of, you know, economics and culture in different ways, you know, Vogt, I think, dramatically underestimated, you know, how much humans, you know, can manipulate the environment and have it be positive. You know, and Borlaug, I think just didn't understand that. When you make land more productive, which is what he was doing, that's going to have overall really positive consequences. But depending on the kind of society you are, if you're a poor farmer, and your land is suddenly more productive, it suddenly becomes worth stealing. And it led to this is what happened in places with really poor property rights, which was most of the world and it led to enormous negative impacts. And then even in places like the United States. The existence suddenly of these tremendous agricultural surpluses led to government programs to empty the countryside. And that has had some really negative social consequences in places like the Midwest and you know, where you suddenly have these towns with hardly anybody in them. And, you know, an underlying cause of our, you know, current social malaise and things like the opioid, opioid epidemic and all that is these depopulated, you know, rural countrysides that were, you know, indirectly caused by the Green Revolution in the sense that it gave, you know, the US government, you know, a chance to You know, support all these policies to get people out of the countryside, the most overt of which was in the 50s, when they paid native people to leave the reservations and go and work in factories and in the cities, but there was all kinds of other ones as well for just, you know, rural whites. And so they are, unfortunately a kind of real victim, I think, and of us not thinking through the impacts of the of our policies.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, you know, from a startup perspective, it's all about iteration and, and pivoting and learning. I think sometimes people get a little too stuck on their priors, so to speak. I mean, and everyone's guilty of this, you know, everyone's guilty of this. So what do you what are you working on next? Like, what's what's upcoming here? You're talking about the revision to 1491? Which, you know, long overdue, it's been, you know, it's 2021. Now, you know, so
yeah, so, originally 1491, this is sort of embarrassing. I was supposed to actually end with a chapter about the North American West, wherr I was raised. And, you know, it was very, very, you know, close to me. And a fond part o me, I'm one of these delusional people that even though I've lived most of my life, actually, on the east coast, if he woke me up in the middle of the night and asked me where I was from, I would say, I would say, from the West, you know, it's a, it's a, it's, you know, it's part of my identity, even though it's completely bogus. And so this was a part that I was most looking forward to writing. And then when I outlined it, the actual outline, just the outline was much longer than completed chapters. And I tried cutting it, I couldn't do it. And eventually, just throughout the entire chapter, and if you read the end of 1491, very carefully, you'll what you'll see as an author waving his hands and acting like there's an actual ending, even though there really isn't. And so it's bothered me for like, 15 years. So after I finished The Wizard and the Prophet, I kind of, my kids start talking about moving to West because we go there a lot, and they like it. And I, you know, and you know, you're you live in Texas, right? It's great out there.
Yeah, I live in Texas, and I am from the west coast. So
right, you're from Oregon. Right? You are correct. You're right, I'm from I'm from a small town in Washington. So you know, it's all... you know, I spent my childhood with my parents driving around the West, which I love very much anyway. Um, so I hauled it out. And, and I looked at it, and I thought, well, maybe I can make an e book out. And then I wrote a real proper outline. And I realized that I had learned some things and wanted to say something. And so this is a history of the West, that does a couple of things that I at least think are useful and different. There, you know, one of the things I did when I started looking at this more seriously, as I went and got all the one volume histories to the west, I could in my area, there's a bunch of colleges and universities. So I went to the library and looked at them all. And basically, they all start at Lewis and Clark. And the idea is that when Europeans come, it's this kind of breaking in history. And in an odd way, it follows James, you know, it follows Frederick Jackson Turner, you know, with this idea that the Europeans come and then there's this movement from east to west of these white people. And, you know, on one side, there's sort of quote unquote, civilization on the other side, wilderness, and they hit the Pacific around 1900, in the West kind of disappears. And the nature is teams for the creation of the Forest Service and the big dam projects. And the focus shifts back east and west kind of disappears, when 2021, in which, you know, fires are burning up the West, and they're running out of water, the idea that nature's tame became kind of silly. And you know, when 40% of the population in the region comes from the south, the idea that the East West movement is the most important seems really, and then there's this ongoing movement, which I think is completely fascinated and really weirdly, unattended to, is that for my entire lifetime, the 294 federally recognized tribes in the West have been steadily regaining sovereignty. And you know, where you are, is pretty close to Oklahoma, which got a big jolt about this last summer in the McGirt Supreme Court decision, which is ultimately going to lead to 40% of Oklahoma being formally declared an Indian reservation. And this is, so now let's think, so what we got is this place where he is really untamed, there's tremendous mixing ground of different people with full of different semi independent polities, it actually looks more like the west of 1200 when there was huge droughts, major fires, and lots and lots of different polity squabbling over.
Thanks for being so positive there.
Well, you know, it's pretty interesting. I can guarantee you it's gonna be pretty interesting.
We're gonna live in interesting times is what you're saying and again, thanks.
Yeah, I know that's a curse
Yeah, so, yeah, so anyway, but anyway, but so you're so...
So yeah, a histor yof that clash. Yeah, you know, a history that talks about well, okay, fire is a big deal, you know, and the idea that fire, you know, you should really think about fire in in the history of the West, you should really think about the fact that there are enormous droughts and that some societies like Mesa Verde really had a tough time of them. But at the same time in even drier areas, the Hohokam did great. You know, I'm not saying, you know, we can copy the Hohokam, but there's clearly principles involved here that we should maybe think about, because what we're doing now is ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I live I live in California can tell you about that.
Yeah. So one of the sparking points of this that made me really think about this is I went to look at some of the Hohokam canals in South Western Arizona with an archaeologist guy. Fascinating. The they're called hanging canals does that term it knows it means anything, a regular canal is that you carved into the landscape the whole day with canals is that they, they have to be at a certain angle. If they're too steep, they'll just scour away through and you know, if they're too flat will overflow their boundary. So they're actually require fairly sophisticated engineering. And usually, they wind their way through the landscape and search for the magic two degree angle. Hanging canals, are like aqueducts or something like that. They just cut through the landscape no matter what. And the largest ones largest system of hanging canals in North America is in Arizona, done by the Hohokam, and they're like, there's some of them are 30 miles long, and they're straight as an arrow over overstep, They're unbelievable. And so I went to look at them, and I was driving to see them, I passed one of these giant channels that they have for, you know, taking the water from the Colorado and this points 400 miles, 500 miles from the Colorado, it's a big ditch, no cover, nothing was 106 degrees in their flood, irrigating. And you can just see the water shimmering off of this lands landscape in this extraordinary way, as they're growing as pima cotton, which is very valuable kind of cotton, they grow there. And you look at this and think like this is not going to last? Yeah. And there's this abandoned system, where the people in 1200 are growing cotton, you know, entirely with their own water in a much worse drought than we have now.
Yeah, yeah. That yeah, you know, the, the kind of environmental history, you know, that's what I think of what you're talking about here is fascinating, because, you know, it's like what you said earlier with vote, like this idea that, okay, so the Geography and Environment affects people. And then there's other histories where it's like social history or diplomatic history, and it's like, just people kind of operating in this vacuum. Right? Like, the, you know, the real environmental history is like there's a reciprocal study, there's an interaction effect. And that's where I think the richness really emerges at the intersection of the two because it gives you just a deeper insight. I mean, you know, in a way, it's almost like Marxism done, right? Insofar as it's materialism, like the materialist history, but it's contingent, it's not deterministic, and it just shows you how humans impact nature, but how net in nature also impacts them and how the two interact with each other.
And it's really interesting, you know, exactly. And, you know, we have this, you know, the Borlaug's you know, if I can, you know, abstract in in a way that isn't quite true, the reality of the sense that nature is like this inert collection of molecules that we can do with what we want. And that's not true. But it's also not true, that nature is this master that pushes us around, and we just have to, you know, go along with whatever it wants.
Yeah, yeah. But but, you know, those two models are much easier to sell. Right? They give simple one size fits all, you know, I mean, I think a lot of environmental history turns out to be case, a case based case by case. It's contingent, and these one size fits all. Maxims, nostrums, You know, explanations are found wanting in so many specific cases that I mean, should we even try it? I don't know. But, you know, that's what's attractive to people. Right now. You know, not to get super political, but, you know, there's some of this stuff about existential, climate change, and like some ridiculous rhetoric, which Yes, I know that it's very small number of people, but you hear about it, you know, humans will be extinct by 2030, or something crazy like that. And I think, you know, I think that's very counterproductive, actually. Because if you tell people, there's no hope you can't do anything, and that we're going to be extinct within our lifetimes. Ah, I don't think they're going to do anything. They're just doing gonna be like, let's just party till it ends? I don't know.
Yeah, I think people are motivated differently. And so probably that motivates some people, but I think most people don't. And the other thing that bothers me is just simply not true. Um, you know, when I was growing up, the Cuyahoga River was on fire, right? Yeah, it was really bad. Like, I recall as a little kid going to New York, and my mother telling me that I were going to go to a fancy place to meet my grandfather, and that I couldn't wear my I had to cover my white shirt, because the air was so dirty, that it would get little specks of soot all over it. Things like that. You're right. And, you know, the fact is that these things are dramatically better. You know, there's not as much lead all over the place. This is a really good thing. And similarly, we've made, you know, enormous progress on even these terrible issues like climate change. I mean, this is so hey, let me try this out to you. Because this is I truly think this but I haven't talked about to very many people. So maybe, maybe that's the reason that I think is it's correct is just simply I haven't been countered it. People tell me why it's wrong. But one of the things that struck me when when I researched the Wizard and the Prophet was I read the Senate hearings at which climate change was first explained to the US Senate in 1988. By oh gosh, it wasn't Michael Mann. I forgotten is a very famous client scientist. I forgotten which one it was. It was it was a Schneider. Schneider was also there. Oh, gosh, this is embarrassing. It's, uh, anyway, he explains it. And the US Congress, you know, the Senate had never heard of this. And so it's a truly unguarded, you know, unpublicized response. It's like, whoa, they say they get it, you know, they're there. And they ask really good questions. And one of them was asked by Pete Domenici, who was a Republican senator from Arizona, and he says, Well, hey, if what you're saying is true, what should we do about it? This is back in 1988. And none of the panelists have a clue. And if you think about it, you know, I did the numbers. And if you wanted to cover your roof with solar panels in 1988, it would have been cheaper to paint it with gold leaf, right? And they're also incredibly inefficient. There's absolutely nothing you could you could do. And we've spent 30 years on this extraordinary investment in carbon free technology. Which is, to my mind, really remarkable, because fossil fuels except for this little inconvenient part, they cause climate change are an incredibly great thing. Yeah, you know, the energy density of them is enormous. The relative ability to curb the pollution except for the carbon pollution, the fact that they're all over the place, there's enormous amounts of them. It's they're absolutely fantastic, except for the fact that they're going to kill us all. And yet, despite this, you know, we invested all this in now, I'm just an ordinary, you know, middle class person, I'm not wealthy, we have an electric car. You know, that's amazing. I never thought I would have an electric car. We have solar panels on our roof, we have a seven kilowatt kilowatt array. If we can, we can, we're not rich, you know, it's not like I've spent a trust fund doing this. We have these amazing LED lights. Lighting used to be 11% of the nation's energy budget with LEDs is gonna go down to less than 1%, all this sort of stuff. It's absolutely incredible. The technology that's been developed, and you know, now not now it's time to use it.
Yeah, so for the listeners who have not listened to all previous podcasts, which you should. So I had an interview with my friend Ramez Naam, who has been working on this. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, he's, let's just say like, he's kept me woke on this stuff, just like his Facebook feed. And, you know, we've known each other since 2004. And, yeah, like, what's happened in the solar space is incredible. It's actually one of the greatest technological marvels of the 21st century, but it's not spoken of, we just kind of take it for granted. You know, the bad good. Yeah,
I wrote an article. And I'm embarrassed to say now in about 1991. For I think, was Technology Review about why battery technology was always going to suck. And that batteries, you know, battery technology didn't go anywhere, basically, for 40 years. And now, you know, it's basically they doubled in capacity in the last 10 years. I mean, it's extraordinary, and they're fighting the second law of thermodynamics. This is a really amazing development. The engineers are doing this. My hat is off to them.
Yeah, yeah. It's pretty incredible. We live in, we live in an age of miracles. There are some serious problems and some serious challenges ahead. You know, and reading your stuff. Charles, I think you can see that in the past, we face some serious challenges and sometimes we didn't always do the, you know, as a species, you know, we didn't always succeed but you know, they're learning experience. You know,
I do like the optimistic tzke? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Let's, let's go. Okay. So here is one of the things I, as I mentioned, I have to amend I think 1491 is that the amount of indigenous slavery was much, much more than than I had realized there's been a bunch of new scholarship on it's very convincing, in my view, that we're talking about millions of people it was awful. And so this led me to look back at what we know about slavery, and basically slavery, which I think it's one of the - The fact that slavery isn't a good idea. I think it's probably one of the few things that almost every political side in the United States would agree on, don't you think? You know, that there's a unanimous thing that actually slavery is bad. Yeah. Yeah. Even Even the people in Texas who are who were saying that, you know, you shouldn't be teaching about this or that in Texas, you're not actually saying you should teach that Slavery is good, right?
Yeah, to my knowledge, you know, to my knowledge. Yeah, exactly. So those are friends of mine, Charles, you know, just like, let's, let's go easy on them.
No, no, no, no, no, look, people have been arguing about what to be taught in the classroom is a great American tradition, it's been going on for 100 years. You know, it's just something that, that that Americans like to argue about, and get worried about, um, I think it's basically kind of healthy. The, you know, although individual cases aren't so great. Um, but the, so if you look back, you know, history, slavery is an absolutely foundational human institution, if you the very earliest codes of laws that we know of are in the Southwest Asia, right? And then the oldest one we know of is this, you know, the code of Ur-nammu. And, you know, it's incomplete. But a third of it roughly deals with, you know, when it's okay to buy and sell people and how you have to treat them and so forth. I mean, it's completely embedded in there. If you go to the code of Hammurabi, which is actually fairly complete, it's, except for sex, you know, but when it's, you know, punishment for adultery, that sort of thing. It's the single most important subject, it's, you know, classical China, slavery is a huge deal, classical Egypt, classical India, you know, classical Rome, Greece, all of them, just enormously important. So, yet, in the last couple, 100 years, basically, by the efforts of nutty abolitionists, there's been this extraordinary revolution in human affairs, and slavery is not okay, anywhere in the world. I mean, the fact that we could take this institution that is about as basic to human society everywhere, as as it gets, and decide that we don't like it shows that we are capable of absolutely enormous changes that I think are extremely positive. Yeah, so no, I
agree. That means,
you know, climate change seems to be nothing compared to getting rid of slavery.
You know, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. And I think, you know, let's, let's end on that positive note. I will be looking forward to your new work and to your next edition of 1491. Anyway, for the listeners for the listeners who have not read Charles books, 1491 1493, The Wizard and the Prophet I really recommend them. Obviously, I'm a big fan. And one of the great things about doing this podcast, the unsupervised learning podcast is I get to talk to my heroes so sometimes they don't always disappoint you all right, but it was nice talking to you Charles.