School of War - Ep 239: Charles C. Mann on How the System Works

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Charles C. Mann, author of “How the System Works” in The New Atlantis, joins the show to discuss the complexity and vulnerability of the hidden processes that sustain human life on our planet.       ▪️ Times     •      01:49 Introduction     •      02:31 Interconnected      •      05:43 Medical care              •      09:20 Feeding humanity     •      11:56 Three advances             •      20:42 Water                •      26:34 Energy          •      36:05 Keeping pace                •      38:35 Hurdles      •      41:12 Solutions                •      45:26 Public health          •      56:38 Concerns             Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Every now and then here on School of War, we get off the beaten path of military history and strategy and international politics, and today's episode is one of those moments. The author Charles C. Mann is going to join us to talk about the extraordinary complexity and fragility of the processes that provide for the modern world's food, water, energy, and public health. The functioning of this system, as he calls it, has allowed billions of people to live and thrive who otherwise wouldn't have. And the relevance to those of us who care about strategy and security is, to me at least, pretty obvious. Should all of these vulnerable processes suddenly halt or even slow, the results will be swift and catastrophic. Let's get into it. It is for the future. So Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the rain, the situation in the ground. It will fight on the beaches. It will fight on the landing ground. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. But you'll never have no. Hi, Marion McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today.

Charles C. Mann. He is a science journalist. You may know him from his bestsellers, 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, and 1493, uncovering the New World of Columbus created, numerous other books and writings and magazines all across the country. Today, we're going to talk about a series

that he's written for the journal, The New Atlantis, called How the System Works. Charles, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining. Oh, it's my pleasure. You know, I have this impression, and it seems that you had this impression,

which sparked the series, that relatively few of us, even those of us who might be inclined to think about it once in a while, are aware of just the complexity of the world in which we live and how the expectations that we have of clean water, energy, food, etc.,

only get fulfilled because of the existence of this vast, complicated, and quite vulnerable world that we don't really think about much of the time. How did you first come to reflect on this fact, which led you to write what I think is really this remarkable bit of journalism? Well, it's something that I've been interested in for a long time because I'm basically a science journalist. And, you know, I'm interested in energy, the environment, food, and so forth,

but particularly from a technical background. And I become aware that there's these enormous systems that we depend on every day for our lives. And this all snapped into focus a couple of years ago when I went to a friend's child's destination wedding on a small island in the Pacific Northwest, which is where I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. And my father owned a Marina.

My parents owned a marina, and they would take us on boat trips. And so I had actually been to this island, you know, 30 years before as a kid. And then in that point, there was where we were, there was no electricity, there's no water, there's nothing. You came to your boat and you camped out on the beach.

But now there was, you know, everything for a destination wedding. We were eating this fancy dinner. There were chandeliers, you know, there's beautiful air conditioning. It was just remarkable. And so I was sitting with a table full of these kids. They're in their 20-something, so that's probably pretty unfair to call them that. But anyway, these young adults. And I remarked, you know, in this kind of old foggish way, why?

You know, through the years ago, you know, this kind of. unfortunate thing that older people do, and they were at least feigned being interested. And they had never thought. But the point was they had never thought about this. And the interesting thing is a bunch of the people at the table were actually engineers, software engineers, but engineers nonetheless. And that this idea, these vast systems that had to come into place for us to be able to enjoy this meal was obviously eye-opening to them. And this point is not so much kids these days, but most of us these days are unaware of that. And so I remarked on this on social media on Twitter, actually. And the people at the New Atlantis, who I didn't know,

said, well, if you think this is so important, why don't you write about it? And I thought, okay, I'll take a stab to sort of ring the bell and make people aware of this. Because the other point is that these systems have to be constantly upgraded and maintained. And that's something we're not doing a very good job of right now. And the consequences are just potential consequences are just enormous. What's the Adam Smith line that seems relevant here, that it's something like a laborer in London, you know, in the late 18th century when he's writing lives better than a king in Africa? Or something along those lines, just the way in which modernity delivers such incredible material results for so many people. And then, you know, the existence of, you know,

unequal distribution of goods and all the various other things that we might be upset about in the world sort of distract us from just actually how remarkable the overall situation is. Maybe speak a bit about that. Like, this island is an example. Like when you went there as a kid, it wasn't much there. There was nothing there. Yeah, yeah. But maybe talk a bit about the world before we can pick one of your subjects.

You cover food, water, energy, and public health in the series. Pick anyone you want. What do the world used to be like? Well, I'll give you an example also from the series. Calvin Coolidge, you know, the president, in the 1920s, I think it's fair to say that Calvin Coolidge and his family had the best medical care in the world that was available in the 1920s. And one day, while he was in office, his 16-year-old son, Calvin Jr., went to play tennis with his brother in the White House tennis courts.

And for some reason, basically from probably just being a teenager, he didn't wear socks. And he got a blister on his toe, on his left foot. The blister got infected. He got very sick. He was taken to Walter Reed, then probably the best hospital of the United States, one of the greatest in the world. And there was absolutely nothing they could do for him from a common staff infection, and he died. So there it is.

A hundred years ago, almost exactly, if you got a blister on your toe, that was a life-threatening event. Fast forward to 11 years ago, and my 11-year-old daughter has a really bad piece of luck. She's in gymnastics class. there's a bad spotter, and she has a really hard fall. And I didn't know this at the time, but every time that you take a hard fall,

you probably actually break your bones. You get these tiny, tiny fractures in them. And if you're incredibly unlucky, as my daughter was, bacteria can swim up into the cracks, get inside your bone, and you have a bone infection. And this would have been almost 100% fatal. But we were able to take her to the hospital, and give her antibiotics.

They actually ended up having to replace her hip with an artificial hip. The whole thing was done. It was covered by our health insurance, thank God. And the result is that my daughter is happy in getting her PhD in engineering today, and I think we'll become a contributing member of society. And, you know, the difference is that I, you know, I'm a freelance writer.

I'm not a wealthy guy. And, you know, and I was able to have... I don't believe it. Freelance writing is not the... the path to riches? Inexplicably, my parents neglected to provide me with a massive trust fund. Anyway, the point is that a middle class guy today has far better health care and far better chance of life than the president of the United States a hundred years ago.

And I often think that we don't appreciate our extraordinary good fortune in being alive now. Yeah. So progress towards this state of affair, obviously the state of affairs, is imperfect and we can complain plenty of it. Oh, absolutely. And progress towards it has been uneven. You document one particularly interesting sort of later innovation in the first part of the series, which focuses on food production, where, you know, as late as what, three quarters or so of the way through the 20th century, this sort of conventional elite opinion that we were all about to starve, or at least large numbers of us were about to starve. And there were too many

people and population control was going to have to be the policy of all enlightened nations because otherwise we were going to run out of food. The population kept growing. It looks like we may be soon to peek out now, depending on how you interpret the current projections. Nevertheless, it did keep growing. It's still growing. And we're not starving. What happened? The biggest, the simplest answer is the Green Revolution. And, you know, if you're absolutely right in everything he said, and in fact, I think you undersold it. You know, I'm, when I was a kid, there's a book called the Population Bomb. And it was an enormous bestseller.

When I went to college, I had the population bomb in three of my classes. You know, in Ecology 101, political science 101, and economics 101. And it was about what a disaster we were going to have. And the first, you know, right at the beginning, it says that the race, you know, the battle to feed humanity is over. I think that's the quote. And that hundreds of millions of people are going to starve in the 1970. And that just simply didn't happen.

And the main reason for that is what's called the Green Revolution. And the Green Revolution is a combination of three technologies, two old ones and one new one, that double, tripled, even quadrupled the amount of food that you could produce from an acre of land. And the result was that in 1970 or so about 40% of the world had what the United Nations, you know, called food insufficiency, meaning that at some point, during the year, people went hungry. And today, that figures like 8%, which is obviously still a lot of people and obviously something that we need to do about, but it still represents enormous progress, especially

when you consider that the world's population was like $3 billion in 1970, and now it's $8.4 billion. And so we have not only reduced the number of percentage of hungry people, but doing it while the world's population more than doubled. So say a bit more about what goes into then, you know, like cultivating an acre or hectare or whatever we want to talk about of an important crop because this is where we start to, I think, appreciate the vulnerabilities of the system. That is to say if you and I, you know, two reasonably intelligent people went out and tried to sort of figure out how to farm like the world farms in 2025. My guess is we just wouldn't be able to figure it out. there's the complexity of technique. There are supply chains.

There's stuff that just has to be passed down. You remark in the series that all of this can be lost in a generation. I kind of wonder if it couldn't be lost a lot faster than that. But what would we need to figure out if we wanted to make an acre of land as productive for, you know, soybeans or corn or whatever today as the professionals can? So as I mentioned, the Green Revolution depended on, you know, three inventions. And so let's talk about those three because those are the fundamental requirements. And the first is having enough water. Most of the world's farmland just simply doesn't have enough water to grow huge amounts of food.

You know, when you have a plant, you know, 40, depending on what it is, 40 to 70 percent of it is water. So you have to provide that. And irrigation is the way to do it. About a quarter of the world's cropland is irrigated, yet it produces almost half the world's food. So irrigation is it. Now, this is an ancient technology, and it's one that we've been, known how to do and have gotten done badly for centuries. And so part of the Green Revolution is constructing these elaborate irrigation networks all over the world.

And you see them in places like the American Southwest or California, you see them in India, you see them in China, you see them in Latin America. It's just everywhere you look, and there's an enormous amount of human labor that's involved in technical sophistication, even though you're just building a ditch, so to speak. The point is that that ditch can't be too steep or too flat. It's usually best at an angle of about

3 degrees. And the reason is, if it's too steep, the water scours away the ditch, it scours away the crop. So the crop has to be just, the whole thing has to be tilted, just very, very slightly. So the water runs off and goes back into wherever it's supposed to go. If it's too flat, the water stays there,

the water evaporates, all waters contain salts and other materials you don't want, you'll poison the soil. Do too much, you scour away the soil. So there's this constant effort of maintenance, of flattening the land to make irrigation work. So really good irrigation engineers have a fantastically good chance at making good living. Let's put it that way.

Okay. Then there's fertilizer. Fertilizer is because photosynthesis, which is the basic process very late, is incredibly inefficient. It's like the dumbest chemical reaction that you can imagine. In photosynthesis, you take essentially water vapor and energy from the sun and combining with carbon dioxide to reduce the carbohydrates that are the basis for life.

It's all facilitated by a catalyst, which is a chemical that's like, my joke is it's like an army recruiter. It takes a bunch of disorderly people outside, processes them, shoves them back into this, it shoves him into the army and goes back for more, being unchanged itself. So its catalyst is called Rubisco. It's this giant molecule. And it is, unfortunately, a terribly inefficient catalyst.

It's one of the worst known typical catalysts in our bodies. We'll do, you know, tens of thousands of chemical reactions, facilitate tens of thousands of chemical reactions per second. This does, you know, a handful per second. So the main way to speed up photosynthesis is to provide more Rubisco. And the amount of Rubisco you have is dependent on the amount of nitrogen the plant takes in. So more nitrogen, more Rubisco, more photosynthesis, more crops. Now, it turns out that there's lots and lots of nitrogen around in the world. You know, the atmosphere is three-quarters nitrogen.

So the idea that there might be a shortage of nitrogen seems really weird. I mean, you know, it's literally in our lungs, right? Right. But the nitrogen in the air, and I hope this doesn't sound too much like 10th grade chemistry. No, no, no. I mean, this is interesting. Yeah. The nitrogen in the air is if you write a chemist, you write the form, it's N2. It's two nitrogen atoms stuck together. And for reasons that I could explain, but I don't think your readers will, your listeners will probably be happy about. I'll just say that they're really hard to separate in that form. So hard to separate that plants can't do. it and our bodies can't do it. Instead, the nitrogen has to be made in other forms, which is typically

in combination with oxygen and hydrogen to be called what they call bioavailable. And there's a real shortage of bioavailable nitrogen. And we've known for a long time that, you know, you put manure and that kind of thing in fields, it makes plants grow. And essentially the reason is that manure is full of bioavailable nitrogen. What happened was that In the 1840s, chemists figured this all out. And then at the beginning of the 20th century, a guy named Fritz Haber, whose name should be known to everybody but isn't, discovered how you could take nitrogen from the air and make it into ammonia

that could then be broken down into the kind of compounds of plants. He discovered this, and the line that people often use is that he discovered how to make bread from air. And it's kind of literally true. A guy named Carl Bosch, then most Germans, as you might guess, figured out how to do this on a massive scale, and that created the commercial fertilizer industry. It's maybe the Earth's most important industry uses about 1% of the world's electricity to make all this fertilizer,

and it's so omnipresent that about 40% of the calories that, you and I eat wouldn't exist if it weren't for the Haber-Bosch process of making artificial fertilizer. And another way of saying this is that about 40% of the world's population exist because, you know, are alive because of this. So that's about 3 billion people. So the fertilizer industry is responsible for the lives of about 3 billion people. And I can't even stress to you what an amazing fact that is. And so you,

Your farmer not only has to know how to plant, you know, make his irrigation work, but he also somehow has to come up with a supply of fertilizer, which he's not going to make himself, right? And then the final thing is that if you flood fields with, you know, the nutrients fertilizer and the water, you have to have crops that are bred to take advantage of this. You know, if you put too much fertilizer on your lawn, you'll kill the lawn. Everybody knows this, right? Who's ever had a lawn and poisoned it as I have? Right.

And so then you need to know genetics to be able to breed crops that can take advantage of this bounty. And so we have, all over the world, our scientists who are busily breeding crops that not only can take advantage of these nutrients, but can do so while dodging the attacks of pests and parasites and, you know, all the other things. that nature provides to want to eat your crops. So there's an entire scientific establishment that you also need to be relying on. Don't feel bad about explaining scientific concepts in relatively elementary terms. My background is as an infantry officer. So my only understanding of ammonia is dealing with explosives made from fertilizer. Right, right, right.

I didn't have to trouble myself with the chemical composition. Right. You can think of it. It takes a huge amount of energy to break apart nitrogen and do this. And that energy, you can think of the explosive made from fertilizer as a manifestation of the energy to make the nitrogen. Yeah, yeah.

And so basically, if Aaron and Charles set out to just become farmers in some post-apocalyptic landscape, and we were like, gosh, we've got to make a lot of food. We just wouldn't, we would not be able to, we would struggle to reproduce what people who were farmers could do 2,000 years ago. Yeah. Which would be complicated enough if you were starting from zero.

But actually, I guess the more important point is, even if we were knowledgeable farmers, we wouldn't, if these systems broke down, we wouldn't have access to we, we can't make our own fertilizer. That presumably requires industrial scale processes, right, that I don't know how many, you know, factories around the world we might posit do this, but you need a real process with infrastructure. Right. And unless you were extraordinarily lucky, you wouldn't have a field that was, you know, by itself suitable for irrigation. You would have to have fancy pumps to bring out the water and bulldozers to level the ground just right. a whole host of other things to go along with that. And then once you had the irrigation in the fertilizer magically,

you would somehow have to come up with the seeds. Yeah. And then the water piece of this, stepping beyond irrigation to just the provision of water broadly, which is another sort of marvel of the modern world, this is the aspect of the system that you seem less optimistic about or more, I'm not sure what the word is I want here, not critical exactly, but you're less bullish on the state of water in its future.

Say a bit about that. Okay. Well, there's two reasons to be unhappy about the way. So water is the world's most pressing environmental problem. There's something like 2 billion people that don't have access to a reliable safe supply of freshwater. And the maddening thing about that is not only is it's terrible in and of itself, but we actually have known how to provide fresh water for thousands of years. I mean, this is a technology that we actually know how to do completely and have understood the basics.

So when I was in my 20s, I traveled around India and Pakistan, and I went to Mohanjodaro, which is, you know, one of the first great civilization in the Indus Valley. And there you can see a city that before the time of the pyramids had a totally admirable freshwater supply, you know, that they, not only did freshwater come in and it was clean, but they pretty much cleaned out the waste and sent it back on. And so we've known how to do this for thousands of. of years, and yet we still have freshwater systems that are a mess around the globe. And this is not just, unfortunately, a matter of, you know, poor places.

This is places like Philadelphia, where 40% of the water in the city is just lost from leaks. This is a matter of Flint, Michigan, famously. This is a matter of places throughout the southwest that don't have good water supplies. And, of course, then you have Mumbai, you have places like Lagos. you know, just all the giant megalopolis is. So all around the world, we have very poor municipal water supplies, either they waste water or the water is contaminated or both. And it's maddening because we know how to, we know how to fix this.

And we don't. Yeah, and I think unless you've spent some time in a place where, you know, public water just isn't a thing, which is kind of hard in 2025 to find places. You can do it, but it's, it's just go to China. Yeah. of China. My example was going to be Afghanistan. I'd be afraid to hear more about China. But, you know, in, in fairness, I was in a pretty poor part of Afghanistan. But there's millions of people in Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and they're just regular people like you and me. If you had a hand pump in your courtyard in Helmand province where I was, you were upper middle class. Yeah. That was good living that you, you had it drilled in and access to the, you know, the table water there. A lot of people had, you know, their day was structured. around the acquisition of water, of long walks, usually the women, carrying these, you know, once they were full, incredibly heavy vessels of water to just do the basic necessities of life.

And you contemplate a world in which something has gone wrong with a public water system for whatever reason. And the way in which life as we know it would shut down extremely rapidly is not something I think most of us spend much time thinking about, but it would be very dramatic and it would be very fast. And it would be awful. I, too, when I went to the Sahel about 15 years ago for National Geographic, I went to Niger and Chad, and it was struck, you know, you'd be out in the middle of nowhere,

and there'd be these lines of women in these remarkably beautiful clothes carrying, you know, these pieces of wood across their backs, and on each end of a piece of wood would be a bucket of water. And they would be walking for miles. It was just, you know, that was their day. And, you know, it's not like these women are dumber than everybody else. Just the amount of human potential is wasted in these hours of thankless work. It's just really frustrating because even though Niger and Chad are poor places and they're very poor, they have the ability to provide water for people, but the governments don't.

I want to switch us to energy, which to me is one of the most interesting parts of the project. Mostly because I think maybe this is just personal opinion, but to an extent even greater than the other systems you're describing, the sort of sci-fi complexity of the grid and what it does and how much of a physical thing it is that we just don't think about that much and how it's managed and how this, you know, just to use a probably not perfectly spot on metaphor, the sort of the power like sloshes around in it like water

and has to be diverted and directed by people. who know what they're doing, is kind of fascinating. How do we get our electricity? How does it work? Well, the great bulk of it comes from a simple physical fact that a moving magnetic field will induce a moving electric field. And so we use fossil fuels, water power, a whole host of different sorts to spin a turbine around and create a current.

And then that current gets passed on, you know, through pipes, essentially, you know, to the surrounding area. And all that sounds very simple. And in fact, you know, physically isn't that complex. It's just everything else that's immensely difficult. Storing energy, even though we've improved battery technology, is still really, really hard. So that means when you flick on the light, the light that you're seeing was a puff of natural gas or, you know, a scrap of coal or a ray of sunshine, you know, a few milliseconds before. So the energy that you were using right now was generated just at the present.

And there has to be a balance, a constant balance between the amount of energy that's used and the amount of energy that's produced. Otherwise, the system gets overloaded or collapses. And so there's essentially the equivalent of air traffic control, there's thousands of them who are constantly monitor, energy flows and shuffling things around. And, you know, when everybody comes home and, you know, turns on the lights and the stoves and the air conditioning, there's a giant demand and they ramp up production for that

just matching in time, then everybody goes to bed and they downgrade it. And it's this fantastic balancing act that has to be done to remarkable precision and it's done every day in our life. And yet, you know, I'm sure I'm like your readers. Every time I turn on my light, I don't say, oh, I thank God that there's an ill electric reliability center 25 miles away that's making sure that I'm not blowing something up when I do that. Right. And how, so the grid in North America, how is it actually organized? Is it one, it's three sort of separate systems. So it's a mess. Okay. Here's the thing. It's a mess. You know, as you read about it,

you keep going, why did they do that? And the answer is a collection of silly accidents. So, you know, Thomas Edison at the end of the 19th century, invents the basic, you know, ideas for electric generation, and there's a whole host of things that are involved more than just the turbine, you know, feeding the power into the turbine and so forth and figuring out the distribution. And he figures all that out. And so people in the wonderful American way immediately say, well, I'm going to start electric power generation company. And so you, the first one is some guys in Appleton, Wisconsin, and then Thomas Edison

just a couple weeks later in Manhattan. And then I think like the fifth one is in Santa Fe, where some guys read about this and but I can do this. And it's kind of, that's that kind of wonderful American entrepreneurial square. But it means that when they start getting everywhere, there's all these independent systems that have come up without any coordination whatsoever.

And the thing about the grid is it works better, the more coordinated it is. But it also gets harder and harder to manage the bigger and bigger it is because there's more and more points of failure. And the result is this patchwork. where we have three main interconnected grids and then a bunch of smaller ones. And power doesn't really easily go back and forth

between them. And so you have bizarre situations like the grid in Texas, when Texas a couple years ago had these terrible freezes, I think it was in February, and the natural gas plants went down and there's lots and lots of power outages. There is tons of power in New Mexico and Oklahoma, but they couldn't get into Texas.

So you have, all kinds of weird anomalies in this patchy way like this, and that's responsible for a lot of problems. But the other issue is that the grid is sort of naturally vulnerable because of this split-second coordination that's necessary. And one of the issues is that as these things get bigger and bigger and better and better coordinate, the chances of a really giant disruption grow with them. It's kind of in what I talked to the engineers, They seem to think that this is a kind of insoluble problem because the best way to administer it is to be larger and larger. And that, of course, creates more and more potential for problems.

Yeah. Huge problems. Right, right. And the vulnerabilities, I mean, to I think a much greater extent than food and water, right, the catastrophic results would begin immediately. Right. With the failure or almost immediately with the failure of the grid. Whereas, you know, you have a problem with the food system. That could play out over days, weeks, maybe even months.

Problem with the water system, sort of hours to days before things start to get really acute. But if the power goes down in a serious way, in a widespread way, that's not restorable, all of modern life, certainly, again, just keeping the security lens in mind, all of modern military and security life requires power. It requires communications, requires all kinds of things that require electricity. And your problems start right away. and the grid is vulnerable because of its inherent fragility, as you just pointed out, and then, you know, its exposure to cyber attacks, EMP, things like this. And the whole world would notice right away that things were getting very bad, or wherever the power went down, people would realize right away that things were going to be

completely different for some time. Yeah, I spent some time in, I mentioned this in series in New Orleans after Katrina, where they had obviously a very prolonged blackout. And it was quite a shock to me to realize how quickly its effects manifested. like you couldn't store food. And in fact, your people's refrigerators became here because, you know, the fire goes out. They lock in and they become these sort of experiments in putrefaction. And basically the only thing you can do is just throw out the refrigerator.

And somewhere to the west of New Orleans is sort of Friglandia, this mountain of 250,000 refrigerators, which is, and full of ghastly stuff. you know, like do not open, do not look at stuff. And that's just one thing. There's a lot of places that life is really tough without air conditioning. And New Orleans happens to be one of them. And so instantly people were really, really uncomfortable all the time. And especially in modern apartment buildings, which are premised on the idea that you would get fresh air from, you know, your air conditioning.

When that shuts, people had real trouble, you know, getting clean air. If you have a hospital, a hospital without electricity is really in a bad place. A grocery store without electricity is really in a bad place. My brother is very handy, and he's building himself a house on one of the Virgin Islands. And he says, it's going to be a freelance writer. Is he a freelance writer too? No, he works as a stuntman and a stunt setter-upper in the movie business. He's a really remarkable guy.

But anyway, he's building this house himself. He's the type of guy who can lay concrete and do all this himself. And I keep saying, Stephen, I believe that your house will survive the hurricane. The problem is the rest of the island because you may have backup power, but what happens when you don't have a grocery store? What happens when you don't have gas? You know, because you need power to pump the gas station. What happens when you don't have all these things that we take for granted?

You can't ride this out. Aside from its inherent vulnerability, the other major issue with energy in the United States these days is the obvious surging demand, driven not only by the, you know, the sort of steady growth of the American economy, but also by AI. Right. The voracious thirst for power of which is apparently quite remarkable. And, you know, whenever you put one of these slightly more complicated queries into chat GPT, and it takes a minute or two sort of sent you something back, apparently. that is draining remarkable quantities of power to power the chips to come up, you know, with your answer in ways that I frankly don't really understand. Nevertheless, I have heard it said by people who are knowledgeable in a position to understand this stuff and certainly to understand the policy

dimensions of this stuff, that the race for AI dominance or, you know, American competitiveness in artificial intelligence vis-a-vis China is fundamentally a question of energy production. And it's apparently not looking great. Our ability to bring just pure production online and then lock it into all these complicated systems is apparently when you compare it to the Chinese who I'm going to maybe mangle a statistic, but it's something like they're putting one new coal plant online every week or something like that. We're certainly not doing anything like that. Yeah. I mean, it's all complicated, but there's three things I think that are going on with the demand for electricity. First, we're getting more affluent and there's more

of us and more people, more electricity, but also as we get more affluence, that means more things like second homes. It means more fancy electronic gadgets. It means more and better, you know, appliances and so forth, all of which typically run on electricity. And then there's a growing industrial demand, which the biggest portion is AI. And essentially to run AI, you have gigantic networks of computers. And, you know, you plug computers into the wall, right? The computers that we're speaking over are plugged into the wall. And so a progress in AI is going from having, you know, 10,000 computers whirring away to 50,000. And you do this in multiple ways, and you end up.

And this has actually been going on for a while. My late father-in-law is a physicist, and he used supercomputers to, you know, calculate out his results. And even in his lifetime, he went from a supercomputer being a network of 250 computers to working on this Japanese supercomputer go Rikin that had 40,000 computers. And he went up the ladder of, needing more electricity. So that's going on.

And the third thing is that there's this growing process called decarbonization, which has been happening for decades, in which people are giving up, you know, ever dirtier types of fossil fuels and switching to cleaner forms of electricity generation. So fewer and fewer things are being run on, you know, gas and coal and so forth, and more and more stuff is just plugged into the wall. And that is adding further to demand. So, you know, no matter how, which of those you think is most important, the fact is that

electricity demand is skyrocketing. And just as you say, we don't have a whole separate problem is that it's difficult for us to make things quickly in ways that I at least regard, it's my opinion, as self-inflicted injuries. You mean through like permitting processes and things like that? Yeah. What are the things that are slowing down infrastructure? So I have to, okay, so now we're switching to my personal opinion.

Sure, sure. Okay. So, which is, everything I say is my personal opinion. Well, I think everything I've said to you so far, I can, I feel reasonably confident is true. Sure. Okay. Okay. When it gets to my personal opinion, I'm less confident that it's true.

Okay. So, you know, I, there's, I hope you're holding a grain of salt. This is a stay of space. Okay. So my perspective is that my wife and I run, in addition to me being a freelance writer, My wife and I run a small construction company. She's an architect engineer. She's the main force behind it.

I'm, you know, the silent partner and so forth. And right now, she's building a barn for a nice farmer, a few miles to the south of us. His barn burned down. He wants to replace it and have a market for himself. Now, this is in a small farm, small town. This is not a complex design problem. But the permitting, she has literally spent, you know, like, 20, 20 hours on the design and hundreds of hours on getting the wetlands permission, getting the agricultural permission, getting the sewer permission, getting the, you know, the permitting, which involves literally the EPA, the State Department of Agriculture, the local town zoning board.

It's just massive. And it has taken an essentially simple, benign project and, you know, cost them much. of delay and made it take twice as long and be considerably more expensive than it would need to be. And this is a very typical story. Now, the difficulty is that each of those regulations is there for a reason. I mean, it is bad to wreck wetlands. It is good to have, you know, a septic field that doesn't leak. You know, all of these things are good, especially for things like this that are going to be for the public. But it's all done in a haremont. pigly-piggledy disorganized, you know, way in which none of the pieces talk to each other.

And in addition, everybody can be sued at any point for any, any reason. And the result is something that has a good purpose, which is making sure that an idiot doesn't wreck stuff is turned into a complete nightmare, even for people who are pretty benign actors like this farm. So what's the solution? Well, I don't know is the answer. I continue to hope that so much of this is routine and bureaucratic that this might be a kind of thing that AI can help with because a great feature of it is the utter lack of coordination of all the different entities involved. Interesting. And so, you know, but that's a complete, what is, swag, I guess super wild-ass guess. Well, first of all, for it to come true, we'd have to actually build the power plants.

Yeah, we have to build a power. But that's, I, you know, I do know that just simply taking a meat-ax to the regulations doesn't help because they, the, although Lord, do I understand the impulse. Yeah. Because they're there for a reason. And the reason is a good one. Yeah, I've lived in, I've lived in places. I lived in Cairo for a while when I was a young person where you have all kinds of sort of unregulated wildcat standards free construction and commercial activity. Oh, yeah.

It's a mess. Oh, yeah. But there has to be a balance, you know. There has to be. And the problem with the system you've just described is you have all these different entities with their different pieces of the puzzle. And none of them have any incentive to really see the whole and make tradeoffs at the cost of their own prerogatives. For them, each one of them, their own prerogative is the priority. Right. And the whole picture and where we might actually accept some risk and cut some corners because the outcomes are going to be are important or whatever. Like that's not something that any of these entities are incentivized really to consider, it seems to me. Yeah, I don't even think you have to cut corners. I mean, you know, my wife is environmentally concerned. She doesn't want to do something bad, but why should she have to have nine meetings to the Board of Health to certify the septic tank?

Maybe one? That's incredible. Yeah. But, you know, the alternative is not good. I can recall one time being in Fujian in Southeast China and staying in a hotel with a couple of friends. We go out to dinner and knock on one of my friend's doors, and he's looking out of his window going like this. and right across this little alley is a hotel being constructed that is an identical to our hotel. It's obviously just a, you know, one construction company is just going,

and putting, you know, hotels down that are all the same. And so he's looking at somebody making the equivalent of his hotel room, my friend, is. And there is a guy there who's welding, you know, the structure together. And he's just wearing shorts. He doesn't have, you know, goggles. He doesn't really have anything. He's got shorts and one glove. And the way he's welding this thing together is going like this.

Because, you know, if he can't look, right? And he's doing, shh, like this. Yeah, for those things you're listening and not watching Charles is sort of just, he's welding in one direction as he looks away in a different direction. Right, right. It doesn't seem like an ideal take. No, no. And so my friend turns to me and says, do you think our hotel was built by this guy? Good point. Good point. It diminishes your confidence in the...

Yeah, yeah. Maybe they might have an earthquake or something like that. Right. Well, you started us with a couple of medical examples, you know, that of your daughter and of Calvin Coler, the tragic story of Calvin Coolidge's son. The last issue that you treated in the series is the question of public health, which is not strictly speaking or solely speaking, a question of medicine. No. Though it involves it. But I'm curious, you know, the state of play with public health. Today, I guess reading your piece, one of the things that most fascinated me was how so many of the, so many of the frustrations we have today, and this seems to me to be the sector of all the things you're treating that is most the scene of populist revulsion and revolt and resistance.

And I would be lying if I didn't say I had a dose of that myself from time to time in recent years. Yeah. That so many of the things that, you know, have been features of COVID in the post-COVID world for us, we've all seen before to include an anti-masking movement during the Spanish flu, which I had no, which involved like a bomb at one point. Like, I had no idea that this was a thing. Yeah, it's, public health has been controversial, you know, from day one. And it's partly because I think there's two things that are involved.

Most of us don't really understand the public health network and what it actually encompasses. And in fact, the things we were just talking about, you know, the massive amount of regulation is a natural segue to it. And the second thing is the way it's been set up. And the original people who set up the public health movement, got the route in fighting against tuberculosis, which was at the end of the 19th century, just epidemic in a way that is really hard for us to imagine. There are studies that estimate that 90% of the people

in places like New York were infected with TB. Now, a lot of them, you know, perhaps a majority of that people didn't show symptoms, but that didn't mean they couldn't pass it to others. And that meant that even if only, you know, 10% of those people showed symptoms, that meant that one out of every 10 people in New York was, you know, coughing,

spitting and doing all that. So you had this enormous disease burden. It was by far the biggest cause of death, you know, from infectious disease and was absolutely omnipresent. So there was this big movement. We have to do something about it. And so they created these sanatoria. They created these camps for people to go to. They said people are spreading TB. So let's not let people spit in the streets. Let's not, you know, let's, you know, not have people taking their handkerchiefs with infected mucous and carrying them around but use disposable tissues like Kleenex. And there is a whole host of ideas that we need to make society healthier. And from, you know, my perspective, you know, 120 years later, they were dead right.

There is a lot of things that were completely crazy. And so they created this network of regulations, you know, to wash your hands when you, if you work in a restaurant, you know, make sure the toilet. can flush in public spaces and so forth. All that's part of public health. And it's important to recognize this because it means that this is embedded in our very infrastructure

and our daily habits. That's the public health establishment. The other part was it was run and created by people in the progressive era in which there was this idea that these smart guys who are enlightened and educated can set the path for everybody else. And you still see that in the medical profession today.

You know, doctors are trained to make decisions for their patients and tell you what to do. And in fairness, you know, there's a lot of us that actually just want that. But what it does mean is that there's not exactly a premium on leveling with people about what's going on. And in my opinion, that's a huge mistake. And that, you know, as in COVID, a huge part of the issue. And there's lots of different aspects of it was that at the beginning of COVID, that people, but like Fauci and so forth, didn't say, hey, guess what? This is a brand new disease. We don't know what the hell is going on. So we're going to give you general recommendations based on general

ideas about infectious disease, but some of these are going to be wrong. There's going to be surprises. And so we're going to keep updating our priors. And we're going to tell you why we think this. Oh, no, I distinctly remember being told in the very early weeks of the pandemic here in the Washington, D.C. area. The whole country was told not to mask. Right. Because I can't even remember. It wouldn't work for some reason. Right, right.

The answer was they were afraid of panic buying. Yeah. And they needed stocks for hospitals. Right. But they could have told people that. And yeah, sure, there were a few years. We all had to mask. Right.

You know, when challenged, and there were numerous developments like that, when challenged, you tended to get these sort of haughty, smarmy responses like, well, we follow the science. Yeah. And that's bullshit. You know, well, if you're, if you, well, maybe then don't assert things with Olympian confidence. Yes. Yes. Yes, exactly.

I mean, I couldn't agree with you more. And in fact, there's a science. So in Britain, there's this outfit, I wish we had an equivalent in the United States called the Cochrane Collaboration. And what the Cochrane collaboration is, is a network, a nonprofit network of doctors who are statisticians. And if you can imagine, hard-ass statisticians. In other words, people who are trained to say, what do we actually know? Because, you know, as everybody knows, it's really easy to fool yourself. And even when you're doing experiments, there's all kinds of ways that bias can creep in.

And so, by chance, in I think it was 2016, the Cochrane Collaboration had been asked to examine the evidence for the efficacy of masking. And they looked at it and they said, wow, there is no good evidence that these things actually. work, particularly in a community setting. And the way to think about it is this, you know, Stan, that you put on your mask and there's going to be always tons of people who are like kids and don't wear the mask properly or like elderly people who are, you know, who can't adjust them properly. And there's always going to be a certain amount of stuff that escapes around the edges of the mask. So the more contagious something is, the less likely that masking in a community setting will have any effect because something like measles, which is super contagious,

you know, just a tiny little bit escaping around the edge of the mask is enough to give it to you. Then you add in all the people who don't wear their masks properly and there's just no evidence that that would work. In the controlled setting of a hospital where you have people who are trained to wear the mask, where you have special masks, yes, that can be effective. But outside of the public, no. And then there's a huge difference between the way diseases are spread, which there is a big, big fight over.

So the answer was when they were telling you to follow the science, if you actually follow the science, the right answer is we don't know. Yeah. Maybe the mask will help. Maybe. You're right. And there are other controversies and abuses we could linger on. The one always kind of gets me is the question of child safety seats.

Yeah. In cars, which undoubtedly and documentedly have saved, you know, thousands of children's lives since they were mandated. But now also, I think pretty well documented is the fact that, that the economic barrier imposed by the need to basically get a bigger car when you go from two to three children to install the third car seat is a meaningful barrier on childbirth. And so we've saved thousands of children's lives, but I believe we have prevented, essentially, the birth of a substantially greater number of children because of the way in which

decisions are being conditioned, which is a kind of wild, sad, interesting, and a dark way development. Right. And it's very difficult to make, we have a very, we don't have a really good mechanism for making that kind of tradeoff. And people get angry about it for a good reason. I'll give you another example from COVID. I have to warn you, this is a little bit of a heavy story. Okay. Okay. So my sister is a special ed teacher. She's one of those selfless people who has given her lives to helping the unfortunate, you know, terribly paid and so forth. She's a wonderful teacher. She's a wonderful person. I really scored in the sibling department. And, you know, when they had lockdowns and the kids aren't going to school, that was terrible for her students.

You know, those kids need to be in the classroom. They need the human presence. They, you know, they can't function on Zoom. And it was terrible for their families because those kids need people around them. And, you know, parents work. It was just awful. The lockdowns hurt the kids, hurt the families, and inflicted enormous human suffering. So they put the kids back in school and the kids are all supposed to wear masks, especially kids can't wear masks.

You know, I mean, come on. They're little kids. And the ventilation of my sister's school sucks. She gets COVID. Now, the bad thing is my sister, in addition to being a saint for teaching all these kids, it was taking care of my mom who was 90 and had COPD. She didn't know she had COVID. She passed it to my mom and my mom passed away. Oh, gosh.

I'm so sorry. So the lockdowns were why my mom didn't get COVID, but they wrecked the lives of these kids. And, you know, that's the tradeoff. I don't know how you balance that. But one way you don't do it is by asserting that science is telling you to do this or that. I think if you acknowledge a tradeoffs, you might have had a lot of money to ventilate the schools properly, which may have prevented. Instead, my sister, who is aware. totally aware of this, actually put in a fan to try and, you know, because she was afraid of being

affected for just the reason that proved terrible later. And the school told her that she couldn't use unapproved equipment because of the threat of litigation. They might lose their, you know, their various certification and so forth. So, you know, that's the kind of thing that you end up with people getting really mad at the public health system. So we've covered a lot of ground today, and we've sort of been lingering. Sorry to that. No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. Look, I mean, most episodes are about war in some variety or another. Yeah. No, but I am sorry. I'm terribly sorry to hear about that tragedy in your own family. I mean, look, we're lingering here at the end of the conversation on aspects of policy and the sort of design of the system that, for good reason, aggravate us and lead sometimes to unnecessarily tragic outcomes.

And that's one piece of the broader picture that we sort of began with, which is overall the system. Yeah. which is the word you are using for this complicated interlocking sets of infrastructure and technology and management. The system produces unbelievable outcomes, unbelievable outcomes unknown in human history, even 100 years ago to the point of your Calvin and Coolidge story. As a closing question to you, when you reflect on the whole thing, I mean, you began this project when you realized that very few people, certainly young people, reflect on it at all. What worries you the most when you look out there and you reflect on the complexity of it all? What would keep you up at night if things kept you up at night about all of this? So let's look at these.

I guess I would put it this way. The four systems I'm talking about are food, water, energy, and public health. In food, world's population is going up, people are getting more affluent. There are estimates that we're going to have to grow something like 40% more food by the end of the century or 2080 or what, you know, there's a whole series of estimates that all say roughly the same thing. There isn't a lot more land to grow it on. So it's going to have to be more and more concentrated,

more and more productive. We're going to have to distribute better and better. And as far as I know, there's just very little thought given by our societies to this overwhelming challenge. I think we can meet it, but we sure can't meet it if we don't think about it. You know, in a big function for that. is agricultural research, which, you know, is getting zeroed out, you know, slowly. A big function of that is making it possible to build the kind of infrastructure that we need

to, you know, ship all this food around. And it goes on and on. The same thing is true for water. You know, most of our water systems in the country were built in the 1960s and 70s. Water, wushing through things tends to wear them down. And a whole lot of them need to be replaced. And, you know, every year the, I forget the name of the Trade Association of Water engineers, but they issued this report about what's going to be needed. And the last one that I saw,

which I think came out last year, was something like $1.3 trillion just to keep us going. And that's a substantial investment. It's going to require thought from all of us. But, you know, that's not exactly what's on the papers today. But it's, I would argue, it's fundamental to everybody in society in ways that some of these cultural issues are not. So the electric grid, you know, the amount of electricity we're going to need in 20 or 30 years to require this massive buildout. We have a choice about how to do it, where to do it, you know, and so forth. And again, it should have reasoned, you know, public discussion other than, I don't like a nuclear power plant near me. Yeah.

You know, we actually need to think about how to do this. And, you know, I, I, a lot of the recent administrations, I don't think have really thought, you know, I give Joe Biden actually credit credit. for this, but Trump, like Obama before him, like Bush before him, really, you know, wasn't paying much attention to this. And then finally, public health, it's pretty obvious after COVID that our public health system has some problems. I, and has got people angry at it. I do think that there's reforms needed. My joke is that Robert Kennedy has about one-third brilliant ideas, one-third ideas that may be true and one-third ideas that are completely crazy. And the problem is that there isn't much agreement between different people and which one-third it is.

That sounds like me on any given fun Friday night. Yeah. So all of these things need sweeping changes, and all of them need to be upgraded and maintained. We're always just one generation from them collapsing, right? One generation of inattention. And so far, I worry that we look like that generation of an inundation. intention. Yeah, I would just add to that. I don't know if you would accept this observation, but this all might fall apart in one generation doesn't actually seem to me like the worst

case scenario. It's obviously a terrible scenario. But I hope that as we're expanding this infrastructure, we're doing it with one eye on resilience and everything implied in that, because this whole, this world that you've just, we've spent the last hour with you describing to us of these complicated systems has, for the most part, all grown up in this post-1945 era where great powers have not directly engaged in war. And that's for all kinds of complicated reasons that we don't have to linger on now. The existence of nuclear weapons would be my nominee for the most important reason. Nevertheless, here in 2025, the taboos on great powers coming to blows with one another

seem to me to be weakening. Which is kind of scary. It's scary for all number of reasons. But this is why I wanted to do this episode. One of the ways in which it's scary is everything's just so much more complicated than it was before 1945 and so many millions and hundreds of millions of lives depend on the functioning of these complicated things and you could imagine it's easy to imagine scenarios in a let's say a u.s china conflict which militarily maybe is mostly happening in the western pacific but the the

consequences and effects of which would absolutely affect the homeland it's easy to imagine ways in which these systems start to break down or cause to break down and in that case we would we would look back and say well gee it would have been nice of it had taken a whole generation to break down because seeing it all break down in a month was pretty catastrophic. Right. And, you know, the grid is the obvious candidate for these, but there are so many different ways that you could bust up stuff, that it's really alarming.

I don't know how you prepare for all of them. I do wish we would prepare for some of them. Charles Mann, author of How the System Works, an essay series on the hidden mechanisms that support modern life and what happens if we don't maintain them for the new Atlantis, also author of 1491, 1493, many other fascinating books and articles. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for joining the show.

That was my pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.