YouSaid · the spoken record

Charles C. Mann

lines on the record: 88
first: 2022-09-14
most recent: 2022-09-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“One of the things I learned about was the Comanche customers and their role in Texas history is just totally eye-poppingly amazing. So that's actually a very fun part. So we can talk about your Texas roots.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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's all kinds of crazy things going on. I guess I think what you're saying is it's very likely to be true in a system that will never exist.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, they aren't today, they never have been in the past. So it seems to me an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if you truly had a free market for those things, but it also seems pointless because if I had to bet, I'd bet that it would be the same way it's been for the last couple thousand years and we don't have a free market and we already have all kinds of weird distortions because of that, you know, from your point of view, you know, the tremendous amount of food that's wasted, the crazy arrangements we have for water in the similarity, these like ludicrous things like 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. Like what the heck is that? That's really crazy and there's, you know, I mean, I don't mean to pick on Texas, but it's just something I was thinking. There's equally crazy things all.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I think that's a very powerful argument. But the problem with it, to my mind, is that the kinds of things that we're talking about, that we care about for carrying capacity aren't things like bubblegum or things like food, water, energy. And those have never, you know, as far as I know, been governed by anything remotely resembling the free market.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might say, and that seems perfectly reasonable to me, but the prophets might say, Well, we should be more epistemologically humble, say we don't know what they want to, let's preserve as many options as possible for them. That doesn't seem crazy. I personally probably leaned more to the wizards on this, but if a prophet said that to me, I wouldn't say, oh, you're wrong. Because that's the same argument about burying nuclear waste, which I also think is very powerful, that we should probably not bury it in some system where it can't be gotten rid of for 10,000 years. We should just make sure that we can track it for a couple hundred years, and there will be more options for people 200 years from now than there are today.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to say I'm uncomfortable with that entire time of reason. This is something that Willie McCaskill talks about. And I think, I don't think, from what I've read of his, he takes seriously enough the question that we don't know what those future people will want. No question that what we want today would have seemed abhorrent to people, you know, most people in 1800. So the idea that we can have any other idea other than they probably want to be alive, it seems much more questionable than I think it does. And so there's two ways to look at it. One is the wizards say, let's, you know, we have an idea. They're going to want to live in this certain kind of utopia and live their longest lives and have the maximum possible physical comfort, which is generally what the wizards say. The prophets...”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And beautiful. Right. Well, they're also out in the fields and not in London, right? Adam Smith's looking at Edinburgh and places like that, which are the most unhealthy places on the planet.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the Irish history is both analogous and not analogous because it is true. They ate nothing but it, but also those people were super vigorously physically exercising because they were out in the fields with really poor tools. So 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. And also the epidemiological environment is so crazy different. And all those people in Ireland only live to the age of 40 anyway, right? So there's a whole host of studies that show that people who take extreme diets almost always they work. You know, nothing but beans, nothing but this, and people lose a lot of weight in the short term. It's really difficult to show that it's possible to keep it off and it's possible for people to maintain these kinds of diets for long periods of time.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I always wonder about the mechanism what would be the mechanism that these tiny trace amounts of these compounds have in them? And how come as our environment has generally gotten cleaner, obesity has risen? So I'm immediately skeptical of this. One of the issues here is that you're dealing with problems that are on the very limits of our ability to measure them. You're dealing with, if you're looking for these things, obviously they have very, very long-term effects, whatever they are. How are you going to actually ascertain that?”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're plugging away. It's a huge, difficult problem, but it's extraordinarily interesting. And to get something like C4 rice would be just an absolutely gigantic increase in productivity. But even in drylands areas, there's this method of agriculture that's used in West Africa and places like northern Mexico, which is silvopastoral, where you have ruminants, cows and so forth, and trees. And the two create a system that is way easier on the land uses way less water and is almost as productive as annual crops. And almost no research has gone into that. That would be another example of a kind of thing that you could do that I would argue would have much greater impact than the person trying to get the latest flavor of cherry. Flavored nosedrops, or something, which is what a huge amount of research is in.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person who's trying to increasingly optimize wheat, something that's already been optimized by 10,000 people. So part of it is that there's this channeling of people into fields that are already well trodden. And I think that you can see that in many, many areas of research. That would be a partial answer to that question.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wheat, rice, maize, and so forth. There's all kinds of alternative crops that are hardly looked at and could be really important, particularly in a time of climate change when we are going to have to have a much more resilient and varied agricultural system to deal with the uncertainties of climate change. So I'd like to, there's hardly any research done in agroforestry. All those crops are essentially wild. How many people are, you know, except for William Powell looking at chestnut? There's practically no real genetic research into increasing tree crop productivity. There's also not nearly enough research in even things like cassava, where you could do a huge amount because there's just, I always tell when I talk to people, I always say, go to these other crops. They're really, really important. They're going to be even more important in the future. And there's virtually no research on them. And you can make giant strides rather than being...”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong, they think. And the reason is that in the areas that I'm familiar with, there's two things that are going on. One is, like in particle physics, it's harder and harder to make discoveries because you're a penalty of your own success. You're pushing harder and harder to do things. And to really get to where you're going, it's just incredibly expensive. So that's a natural phenomenon. It's not anything really to worry about because, you know, what do you want to do? Undo the past 50 years of success in particle physics, people like Murray Gelman could do a huge amount because there's no, there's, we didn't know anything. So you're seeing just plain old diminishing. The second thing, though, and I think is something, is that it feels like agricultural research, the vast majority of research is in a bunch of narrow areas.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People than anything else. And in 1960, it's probably food and water. And so food is actually the food and agriculture organization once they get interested in Borlog actually does a pretty good job of promoting it and there's the creation of the SeaGar system. It could always use more water is completely neglected. And actually I would channel it towards water.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question. I mean, that's the greatest good for greatest number question. And to do that, you would have to say, what are the biggest problems facing the planet? And then presumably if you're William McCaska or somebody like that, you say all lives are equal. And so what is the thing that's most affecting the most number of lives? In that case, it's probably clean drinking water, right? I think that's the biggie. And that means funding urban funding primarily urban infrastructure for water and setting up some kind of foundation or some independent agency that's not insulated with insulated from government to actually keep those water systems going. That would be my answer on that, which would be that's how you would do it. I think you try to figure out what are the barrier necessities, what's killing more.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bottle, and what it says is that you have to reduce the 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 profit so that you can spend more”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in that case that was a very successful case of As far as I can tell, of regulatory capture in which the opponents of the technology successfully created this crazy, one of the weird things about nuclear stuff, this is not actually in the book. I actually wrote a whole long section about it in the book and I cut it out because it felt like it was just too much in the weeds. If you have a coal plant, they have environmental rules and the rules are based on a threshold principle that you set a safe threshold for the emission of particulates and other things. And as long as you're below that threshold, you're fine. Nuclear power has, I think, for its main type of, quote, pollution, which is radiation, but it's called the linear no threshold.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within the next 10 years, is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already. And that's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and the precautionary principle say that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. 10 years is not, I don't mean to imply that that's nothing, but really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of a thing that was killed off?”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend Neil Stevenson called Termination Shock, which is about some rich person just doing it, just doing geoengineering. And the fact that it's actually not against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere, in his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells into full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. I guess the question is, what time scale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extraordinary efforts to test. And I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. So I just feel have this, there's this great problem in that the flaws that you identify, I would like to back off and say this is a problem sort of inherent to government. And that there is always, you know, they're always protecting us against the edge case. And the edge case sets the rules and that ends up, you know, unless you're very careful making it very difficult for everybody else.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. And, you know, it was kind of like this, I was phrasing it crudely, but I think you see the kind of trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? And so I would argue that sometimes it's well managed and sometimes it's not. Like it's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism in record time and they pass pretty rigorous safety reviews and they were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right? So that would be the counter example. You know, you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. And they let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, they've done it, especially for the chest.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's possible. I mean, you know, bureaucracies can always go rogue. And government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. So let us take, for example, People occasionally do things you would never imagine as completely screwy. And so then you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that. And that impedes everybody else. And so in the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30s when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfanamide that killed hundreds of people. It was a flat-out poison. And hundreds of people died. You think like, who would do that? But somebody did that and they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay. And then something with thalidomide, you know, which they did stop here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. So I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by government here in which you either let through really”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact is that Borlaug did develop this suite that came into India, but it's also a fact that it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminatan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me of this book was when I went to Tamil Nadu and I listened to this and I thought, oh, I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat and they made it into Indian wheat. I don't even know if Borog ever knew they really grasped that they really had done that. By the way, a person for you to interview is there's a, yes, it's Marcy Boransky, excuse me, B-A-R-A-N-S-K-I, and she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution. She sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, or else you know, you want to listen to the, 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 and very frequently they're right about those things. The social issues, 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 manuscript. I almost never agree with their solution, but they're correct about the diagnoses.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that all matters in his insistence on feeding the poor, that was it. So he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered. It would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism and the discovery of antibiotics and so forth, as it was leading to a real population rise. And the amount of human misery that would have occurred is really frightening to think about. So in some sense, I think he's right, but I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, it's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this. And I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist who has kind of a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. I mean, the amount, the insane amount of work and dedication that he did is really hard to imagine. And the fact is that he was going against many of the plant breeding dogmas of his day.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I certainly have time. I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things is that about podcasts is that as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer had. I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired by the, you know, they should switch roles or something.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“fed with rice in a country that has very little water. And if you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. Okay, and prophets believe that there's these planetary boundaries. And so in history, these are typically called Malthusian limits after Malthus. And the question is, with the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery? And the great thing about history and this sort of thing is it provides evidence Which it provides evidence, if you like, for both sides. One is it increases human capacity and the second, unquestionably about it, increases human numbers, increases possibility. The second is it leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's an inherent carrying capacity or limits or planetary boundaries. You know, there's a bunch of different names for them that say that you can't do more than so much. And so what happened in China is that European crops came over. And China's basic, one of China's sort of basic geographical conditions is it's something like 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area has 20% of the world's population has a appreciable chunk of the world's surface area, but it only has 7 or 8% of the world's above ground fresh water. There's no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there's only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Huang Hei or Yellow River. And the main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools. You know, rice. And so there's this paradox, which is how do you keep people?”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so let me interject here for those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet, and there's about these sort of two camps that have been around for a long time regarding about how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, you know, you can call them, that's my name for them, Stuart Brand calls them druids, in fact, originally the title was going to be involved the word druid, but my editor said nobody knows what a druid is. So I had to change it to wizards. Anyway, you know, say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental deliverance. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and we can, you know, we can escape these kind of dilemmas. And the prophets say, no, the natural systems are governed by laws.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there's a kind of funny aspect to this, and that was partly what was happening in China, is that they were, unfortunately, China is very large, and so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes. But it was definitely weakened the country.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cycles and energy. And to me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people are, who are Bitcoin miners, are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. So a guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change. And to set them up, he wants to set them up and really weird remote areas. And I was saying, who'd be your customers? And he said, Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And I just thought that is a really crazy to, you know, 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.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bitcoin's case strings of zeros and ones. So that part of it makes sense to me. What the extraordinary thing is that when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly, which is what you're talking about, and we were talking about in China where people got a medium exchange, but they had to work hugely to get the money. I don't have to work hugely to get a dollar bill, right? To get the dollar bill. It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing this. And that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's to a lesser extent what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but the Bitcoin in this case is using computers.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way that money works, right? I go into a store and 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. And history is, of course, replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money that to us seems very silly, like the cowrie shell or in the island of Yap, you know, where they had giant stones. And those are money. And nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. So, you know, I would get coconuts or gourds or whatever. And now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many other places as soon as you get as soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to annex other things. You see that over and over again all over the world. So that's part of it. So all those things, I think, contribute to it, this out and outlying, this delusion and various delusions plus hubris.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money in the hills, and there's this longstanding belief there's got to be more of that. And in the Americas, we just need to find out. So there's always that hope. And finally, there's this kind of imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys without a colony. And you see that with, you know, later in the 19th century with Germany becomes a nation. And one of the first things it does is, you know, looks for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of keeping up with the Joneses aspect. It just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class that you got to have an empire in this weird way that seems very culturally part of it. And I guess it's the same for”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Americas were far narrower than they actually are, and there's a, I think I reproduced this in 1493. There's all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing this little skinny Philippines-like islands. And there's a thought that, you know, you just go up to Chesapeake and you go just a couple hundred miles and you're going to get to the Pacific and to China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow. Sir Francis Drake and people like that had shown that there was a west coast. And so they thought the whole thing was this narrow Panama-like inlet. So there's this geographical confusion. And finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity because it's not perishable. It's small. You can put it on your ship and bring it back. And it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. You dig up.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do all this stuff, and the cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations remover and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia company. A second thing is that There is this dogged belief kind of based on Inabilities to understand longitude and so forth, that the”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And part of it is the backers of the Virginia company in sort of classic BC style when things are going bad, they lied about it and they're burning through their cash. They did these rosy presentations and they said it's going to be great. We just need this extra money, kind of the way that Uber did with, you know, and then there's this tremendous burn rate and now the company's in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Class. He talks like Easter Island. And the striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land 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 enslave most of the people who are living there. We know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. And after a collapse, you were probably better off. So all of that, I feel like is important in this discussion of collapse. And I think it's hard.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that, those are 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're Maya radio stations, their Maya schools, they're 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 collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of what do you mean collapse? And you see that in against the grain, the James Scott book, where you say, what do you mean barbarians? These guys have it pretty good. And if you're an average Maya person, you know, working as a farmer under the...”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost Mexican province, and that is where you probably heard about the Commandante Zero, and these rebellions are going on. And we were looking at some Maya ruins, and they're two beautiful, and I stayed too long. We were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. And I was like, oh, God, you know, not only have I, you know, got myself into this, I got my son into this. And the guy comes and he looks at this and says, who are you? And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets looked this disgusted look. He says, go on. And I said, wait a minute, the journalist to me takes over and says, well, what do you mean? Just go on. And he says, we're hunting for Mexicans. And I drive about a mile. I think, wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I don't mean it that way, but it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. 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. And that goes to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in ways that you sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Maya collapse, but there's 40 million Maya people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards are still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. Well, not the ones that I've read. And the reason there's two reasons for that. One is, and it's not really a mystery if you have a society that's epidemiologically naive. And, you know, smallpox sweeps in, kills 30% of you. You know, measles kills in, kills a 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time. That's really tough. I mean, look what COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's one 330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids. Elderly people like my aunt. So I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, so he, you know, they see all of this in really religious terms. And more or less, Native people did too. You know, they thought, you know, all over and over again, there is this thing like we must have done something bad for this to have happened. And so this is a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God had either punished you or failed you. And this was 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, you know, if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, think, well, maybe I should adopt their God.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to remember the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither of the Spaniards or the English or Native people had a clear idea of what was going on. And in fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad and you got, and the air was bad, and that was malaria, malaria, right? That was an example. And God is in control of the whole business. When the diseases came, there's a line from my distant ancestor, the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my, you know, umpteen, umpteen, umpteenth ground. That's how WASPI I am. He's actually my ancestor is about how God saw fit to clear the natives for”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Japan giving up the gun, actually banning guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them and they said, ah, nope, don't want them. And they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, Japan, and there's this thing where supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their values and what they're trying to do in war than it would for Europe's. I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario in which it's not just blinkered, but an expressive of what those people were trying to do on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hessig called Aztec Warfare in which he, it's an amazing book, which is like a military history of the Aztecs. It's really quite interesting. And 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.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so you say like, okay, 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 like whack off the head of a horse with a big, strong guy with a single. So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. So part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers and, you know, grunts to go and get, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. And this was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. And so maybe this worked not having steel worked better for.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source