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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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“That would imply to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they did have Travois, you know, I'm not sure if I traveled TRAVOIS, which are these things that you hold, and they have these skids that are shaped, like kind of like an upside-down V, and you can drag them across rough ground. You don't need a road for them. And that's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this and you think like, maybe the ultimate labor savings was, I mean, this was good enough and you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work, you know, so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It or you know in the book 1491 I mentioned the mold board plow which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. Invented in China thousands of years ago not around in Europe until the 1400s like come on guys what was it? So there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity that kind of and one of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact and so forth is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, I mean the more amazing thing is like in Mesoamerica they had the wheel. It was on child's toys. Why did they develop it? And the best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. And a cart then would have to be pulled by people.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's just amazing to me. I don't know, and this is like one of those things, like I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained and I went out, I walked the dog. And I'm always amazed that you can, there's literal glistening drops of water on the crab grass. And I, you know, you pick it up. Sometimes there's little holes eaten by insects in the crab grass. And every now and then if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens, right? And you can look through it and you can see it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see it's magnified. And you think like how long has there been crabgrass or leaves and water just forever? We've had glass forever. How is it that we had to wait to van Luenhoek or whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you an example. My own thing, the internet has made it possible for me to do something like have a Twitter thread and have millions of people read it and have a discussion. That's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, the Washington Post has an article about how every book it's Texas. It's one of the states that a child checks out of the school library, goes into a central state database. And they can see and look for patterns of people taking out bad books and this sort of stuff. And I think like, whoa, that's really bad. That's not so good. And it's really the same technology that this dissemination and collection of information, vast amounts of information with relative ease. So all of these things, you take the bitter with a sweet.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this sort of shallow comparison, there's some certain similarities. And I don't think this is entirely flattering to either groups. You know, it is absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia and in northern Mexico created to a large extent the modern world. But it's also true that they created these sort of cesspools of violence and exploitation that we're still, whose consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley. And it's products that I use them every day and I curse them every day.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it, but so it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this sort of off the top of my head. And then with the idea that if I start saying at the end of it, I can say, wait a minute, that's ridiculous. Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose or were oblivious about what they had to lose and kind of had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things and just get up and keep trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. And it's pretty clear and are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least in”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guys who nobody knows who he is, but was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893 called The Significance of the Frontier. And it was the thing that established this idea that there was this frontier moving from east to west. And on this side was savagery or barbarism and on this side was civilization and tame nature and wilderness and all that. And it goes to the Pacific and then that's the end of the West. And that's still in the textbooks, you know, in different form. We don't call Native people lurking savages like he did. That sort of stuff. It's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in there textbooks. It's such a bedrock thing. I'm saying that's actually not a useful way to look at it given what's coming up. And there's a wonderful Texas writer Bruce Sterling who”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they roll in from the east and kind of take over everything. The West disappears as a separate entity. Native people disappear. Nature is tamed. And that's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. It was in, you know, do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? So he's like one of these”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is the most iffy of the whole thing, but I'm going to go out on a limb and do this say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294, I think, federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. And that's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. And so then you think, okay, so this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties, and nature is going to really be in kind of a turmoil. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s. And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth and sort of says that there is this breakpoint in history when people look like me came in and sort of rolled in.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or it has been in the recent past. That would just be really a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. It would be a surprise if it wasn't all the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast. So it's going to be a real mixing ground, ethnic mixing ground. And then there's going to be an center of energy, sort of no matter what happens, whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, hydroelectric. The West, it's going to be economically extremely powerful because energy is sort of the fundamental, you know, a fundamental industry. And the last thing is.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder. And I thought, okay, I'm going to write this out more seriously now, you know, 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long. I thought maybe this could be an e-book. And I showed it to my editor. And he said, that is not an ebook. That's an actual book. So I pick a chapter. And I hope I just haven't padded it. And it's about the North American West. And something I've added is thinking about it is my kids like the West and at various times they've said, you know, what would it be like to move out there? Because I'm in Massachusetts where they grew up. And so I started thinking about what is the West going to be like tomorrow when I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now. And it seemed to me that we won't know who's president or who's governor or anything. But there's some things we...”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, sure. Okay, if you're not. Okay. Okay. So this is sort of a weird thing. It's like a sequel or something or offshoot of 1491. And that book, I'm embarrassed to say was supposed to end with another chapter. And that chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up. And I'm very fond of it. And apparently I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter, the actual, the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. And I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth. And it just was awful. And so I just cut it. And if you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. It's just got at the end the author sort of goes, hey, I'm ending. Look at how great this is. And so this has been bothering me for 15 years. And so during the pandemic, you know, when I was stuck at home and like so many other people, I hauled out what I had.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's happened in the last 20 years is in basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only things that survived and the ordinary people didn't? And you can never be absolutely sure though. But what they have done is they kind of LIGARG and ground penetrating radar surveys. And it looks like this sort of more egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. And so it's possible that there's even more, really, really poor people within thing, but at least you'd see the aggressively large quote-unquote middle class getting there, which is very, very different than the kind of picture you have of the ancient world in which there's the sun priest or somebody, and then all the peasants around there.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then their descendants start the Pueblo who are this sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. And it looks like a political revolution took place. And in fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing that it's sort of tongue-in-cheek, but also seriously that this is the first American revolution. They got rid of this guys or kings or something and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice in what went on.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite quickly. And you see this lots of times in the Americas, in the southwest, I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, can't tell you you should absolutely go. Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible and so forth, but it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. And Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible. It's just really a fantastic thing to see. And there's these.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of social status. So it looks like could there have been a political revolution of some sort? They create something much more egalitarian, probably with kings, but a bunch of good guy kings who aren't interested in elevating themselves so much. Now, it isn't, and there's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this and they make this argument that Tehnashitlan is an example that we can look at of an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. In my view, go a little overboard. It was also an aggressive imperial power and was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time, but it is absolutely true that something that started out one way starts looking very differently.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I got a chance. Beautiful But one of the really interesting things about Teotihuacan, and again, this is just one of those things that you can only say so much in one book. And if I was writing the 2000-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tek Teukon pretty much starts out as a standard imperial project and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. And there's no reason to suppose it was anything other than building the pyramids, an awful experience involved. But then something happens to Teotihuacan. We don't understand why after that, more or less, all these new buildings spring up in the next couple hundred years and they're all very, very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. And it's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is. And that's usually thought to be a reflection of”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had all this marble around, so you could make these things a giant slabs of marble, which seems from today's perspective incredibly wasteful. So, yeah, so you're going to have some things that are universal like that, and along with the apparently universal or near universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's also geometry. I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long lasting monument that's a cylinder. And so pyramids kind of are, and also they're easier to build as you get off a cylinder, you have to have a scaffolding around it, and that gets harder and harder. Pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one on and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now, what you make them of is going to be partly determined by what there is. And so in Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a whole lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids. And there's going to be, if you want them to stand for a long time, there's certain things you have to do for the structure in which people figure out. Same way for the pyramids, you had all this, I guess.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you could say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned, but still, you know, this actually happened in the 1540s, largely because people like Les Costas said, this is bad. You're going to hell. You're doing this.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the same thing is true for Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s, sort of comes out of nowhere and starts saying, hey, this is bad. And he is this predecessor of the modern human rights movement. And it's absolutely extraordinary figure. And he has huge amounts of influence. And he causes Spain in the 1540s to pass the king, to pass what they call the new laws, which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow, you know, if it had been enacted to the colonial economy because it all depended on having slaves to work in the mines, the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was, you know, the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy, but the entire Spanish Empire and was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slavery was typically associated with agricultural labor, and so as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery became less and less important, and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning collapse of the colonial order. I think that part of it has to do with just a, at least in the West, and I don't know enough about the East. It's just to say, but you have the rise of an abolition.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this thing has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, machinery gets better. And so the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery or to create a wage in which are run by wage people, wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that there were the industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a really good question. So the real answer is historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but for decades. And there's a bunch of different explanations. And the reason I think that it's so hard to pin down is it's kind of so amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and to put red in countries in which slavery was not legal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. I mean, it was like the most ancient human institution that there is. The code of Hammurabi, which I think is still the oldest, completely legal code that we have, about a third of it is about the rules for when you can buy, when you can sell, how you can mistreat, how you can't, you know, all that stuff. It's about a third of it. It's about buying and selling and working other human beings.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so this is yes, exactly. This is part of that dynamic. A certain number of people, who wants to be a slave, right? And as many people as possible leave. And it's easier in some places than others. It's very easy in Brazil. And so all these, there's 20 million people in the Amazonian Amazon, something like that. And the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. And they're still Brazilians and so forth. you know, they ended up not being slaves.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How long do nations last? How long do nations last? I mean, that's true. The Genghis Khan, how long did the Khanate last? It had some impact, yeah. So I know what you mean. I know what you mean. And basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There is an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence for the same reason that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality is because it was seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the 1880s, the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves and so forth and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally from the time of colonialism and now the new British state, excuse me, new Brazilian state, is trying to take control and they fight them to the last person. And so you had these effectively independent areas not de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. And there are some in the US too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those maroon communities in North Carolina. And there is certainly ones in Mexico where everybody just agreed these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything. And if they don't mess with us,”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partly to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations, wasn't in terrible shape. Whereas there were things like Palmarius where you had for more than 100 years people who were self-governing. Now eventually they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. But you could also point out that there's a great Brazilian sort of classic like Moby Decker or Huck Finn is to the US is this thing called Oshutois by a guy named Acunya. And it's translated. It's an amazing translation, very good translation in English under rebellion in the backlands. What it is about is”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess he would have to say, define successful. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time. I mean, Haiti.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there's this thing that I think is not stressed enough in history, which is that often the elites kind of recognize each other and they join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing. It's an amazing book, and it's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fractricidal stuff going on in the Mughal Empire, and one side thought, oh, we'll get these foreigners come in and we'll use them. That turned out to be a big mistake.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, illogicals, some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his guys in. And in fact, I was struck by this, I've just been reading this book. Maybe you've heard of it, The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing for the Inca. It's a very powerful but also unstable empire in Pizarro has the luck to walk in right after a civil war. And when he does that and right after Civil War and massive epidemic, he gets them at a very vulnerable point. But again, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allies with the losing side or the apparently losing side in the civil war and is able to sort of create a new rallying point and they attack the winning side. So he's, you know, so you have, yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fractrocial stuff going on in the leadership.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Into the popular consciousness, certainly it was new, and I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it, largely Spanish and Mexican scholars, about the conquest within the conquest. And so the allies of the Spaniards, Talash Caracan, Talatelco, and so forth, actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. And so there is a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. In that sense, yes, but also the conquest wasn't as complete as we think, because what happened is Cortez moves in. And what he does is he marries, I talk a little bit about this in 1493, he marries his lieutenants into these, you know, these indigenous. And creating this hybrid nobility that then extends on to the Inca.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, empires are much more sort of jumbly fragile entities than we kind of imagine. And there's always fighting at the top. And what Cortez was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs, the tripleites. They're better called the triple alliance. Aztec is a invention from the 19th century. And that was three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tinochilan. But there are other two guys who remember this really resented them. They were the superior guys and what Cortes was able to do was to foment a civil war within the Aztec empire and to take some of the enemies of the Aztecs and some of the members of the Aztec Empire and create an entire new order. And there's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really, I think.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About whether this was a good idea or not. And you had a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy, sort of asking the Pope, is it okay that we do this? And you can imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. Some of it was, I think, going to happen, I think, but how exactly it happened is really up to chance and contingency and human agency”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Civilizations that, in fact, just does that. It's a great alternative history book. And he imagines that some of the Vikings came and they actually extended further into North America than they did. And they brought the diseases so that by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. And what happened was that when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went to Europe. And the Inca conquer Europe in this. And it's far-fetched, but it does say that even this encounter will happen and the diseases will happen, but it doesn't happen to happen in the way that they did. It's perfectly possible to imagine, again, that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that sometime people from Eurasia and people from the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? And there was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres, largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that led almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases, diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. And most of the great killers in human history are that kind of disease. So they're going to meet, there's going to be those kinds of diseases. But, you know, it's possible to imagine, if you wanted to, some alternative histories, there's a wonderful book by Laurent Binay.”
2022-09-14 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Charles C. Mann - Americas Before Columbus & Scientific Wizardry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source