Charles C. Mann

I'm your host, Ryan Schinkel.

Today, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest the journalist and author, Charles C. Mann, to talk about the nature of progress and the public systems of food, electricity, water, and health that sustain our modern civilization.

A contributing editor at Wired and The Atlantic, Mr. Mann is the author of many books, including... 1491 and 1493, two histories of the Americas before and after Columbus's landing, The Wizard and the Prophet, from which was adapted a 2025 essay series and one lavishly illustrated for the New Atlantis called How the System Works, that will serve as the basis for our discussion.

Mr. Mann, welcome to Madison's Notes.

This is our fifth article from Issue twenty-six, which arrived with print subscribers last week.

In it, Charles C. Mann explains how he learned to love porcelain.

I am aware that I am a bit of a kitchen equipment nerd, okay? So maybe you don't have to roll your eyes theatrically like my cousins did when I tell you my wife and I got a swanky induction cooktop that was, well, kind of pricey for a middle-class couple.

And maybe you can imagine my irritation when it turned out that the swanky induction cooktop, did I mention it was pricey, did not include the necessary smooth cooking surface above the induction burners, and that you had to buy the cooking surface separately from a separate company, a fact not exactly advertised on the website, and that the surface could not be tempered glass, which is what I had thought was on top of induction ranges, a sheet of which costs maybe thirty dollars per square foot, but a special newly created material called Dekton that cost five times as much.

We teach history in our organization.

Right now we're going through a book called 1491 by Charles Mann.

It's a really great book that talks about the native societies that were existing here before Columbus arrived and how when white people showed up or Europeans showed up, um, they were, they came here, they were distressed, they were lost, they were confused.

They were, they were, um, full of plagues and sicknesses and they, they could not survive.

So now I want to quote from another fine book which I'll recommend for you.

It's by Charles Mann.

It's called The Wizard and the Prophet.

It is about William Vogt, who we just spoke about, and Norman Bollog.

The one that I just wanted to highlight here is...

Joe Carl Smith, co-author of Claude's Constitution, which is basically sort of the values and behavior training document.

It's like, what does Claude deeply believe? What are its core values? Said, we may have to talk about slavery and that AI may be justified in going rogue.

So this is, it's not quite, it's not quite saying humans don't matter, but it is sort of putting AI, maybe shrimp, right? Like, you know, but like AI in equivalence with human existence in a way that I don't know that I would go quite that far.