The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan https://amzn.to/3M5n5Qk A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: A revolutionary new history that reveals how climate change has dramatically shaped the development—and demise—of civilizations across time *Detailing many years of extensive research, endnotes for this edition run to more than 200 pages. They are available online via a link contained in the book.* Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that spans centuries and continents, Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us. Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century. Again and again, Frankopan shows that when past empires have failed to act sustainably, they have been met with catastrophe. Blending brilliant historical writing and cutting-edge scientific research, The Earth Transformed will radically reframe the way we look at the world and our future.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep in keep your hands arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com i don't know why you guys love, but I always have to do it because you run up to me and do that to me wherever at an event I go. The chrisbossshow.com.

And I'm like, security. Hey, guys. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, refer to the show to your family and friends. We've got an amazing author on the show. He's all the way from Oxford, from across the pond, as we like to say, over there on the British Isles. Is it the British Isles?

No, it's Britain, but it's somewhere over there. I'm American. Nothing exists outside of our sphere of experience because we're uneducated over here. So in the meantime, we have someone on, a brilliant professor, to educate us as well. In the meantime, go to goodreads.com for just Christmas, youtube.com for just Christmas, linkedin.com for just Christmas, and our new artificial intelligence podcast that we just launched. And we've put some of the great artificial intelligence,

AI interviews that we've done on the Chris Voss show on that new vertical over there. And we'll be sharing a lot of shows over there. So go see that. And we'll also be doing a few more interviews maybe 10 20 more interviews on the show with ai specials so we'll be talking about that how it's going to change the world so that might be interesting uh he is the author of the amazing new book that just came out april 18th 2023 peter frankopan is on the show he's a professor at oxford uh he has written a new book called The Earth Transformed, an untold history that just came out.

You can order it fine. Books are sold everywhere. Stay away from alleyway bookstores because they're dangerous. You can stub your toe and get tetanus in them. So that's bad. Or you get mugged. I don't know. He is a professor of global history at Oxford University. He is the author of The First Crusade,

The Call from the East, The Silk Roads, A New History of the World, and The New Silk Roads, The Present and Future of the World, and he lives in Oxford. Welcome to the show, Peter. How are you? Hey, Chris. Very good. And just when you're saying about AI, this could be in your last six-month window of guests because i thought went close to the point where you'll get an ai version of me speaking whichever language you want by the end of this year so that'll that'll be more interesting for everybody rather than having to put up with the real me and you can you can dial me and say whatever you like and me too i mean there's there's podcasts now that they're trying to have run by ai

they're not we could go fishing instead there you go well they're not to have run by AI. We could go fishing instead. There you go. Well, they're not as funny as me yet, given time. And they don't have the idiot personality that I have. So there's that. See, that's how AI is going to stay ahead. So you're safe. But a professor, they're definitely replaceable. Just press a button and say,

give me 20 minutes about the US Civil War. Once they can be funny, I'm fucked. So funny and interesting in character. And I don't know people people i don't know why people tell me they tune in for me and i'm like why we have such great guests like i'm not that interesting people and that's why we have guests on the show like yourself so uh peter give us your dot coms so people can find you on the interwebs and track you down better. So I'm on Twitter at Peter Frankopan with a K and then my web address is www.peterfrankopan.com

That's it. Otherwise you can find me on the Oxford University website, but please, please, I've got thin skin, so I only like compliments. If you've got something really with beef, then give me a second shot. Get Chris to invite me back and we'll sort it out that way. There you go.

I advise not getting on twitter it was the hate will come so you wrote this giant book uh could you made it larger no i'm just kidding it's 600 and i think 700 pages a beautiful book with the lots of different pictures and maps i can't read clearly so uh that's why i like the beautiful pictures. What motivated you on to write this book? Well, so I work mostly on regions. I work on Russia, Ukraine, China, Iran, Central Asia, parts of the world that are on the move a lot at the moment. And I guess whichever way you have your political persuasion, one of the big questions of the 21st century is the rise of China. What does that mean for the US? What does that mean for China? What does that mean for the rest of the world? And I thought the second

really big question is what's going on with our climate and with our natural world? It's not just about global warmings and things like that. It's also about, well, your Great Lake and Salt Lake, or how we treat the environment around us, so that every single cubic meter of seawater now in the oceans has 40 pieces of plastic micro microplastics that's probably not great to be eating drinking and so on so trying to understand how we've got to this point where we turn out we're not such great custodians of the great outdoors as we maybe could and should be what does that mean for us going forwards uh how people manage to cope with major events in the past of climate change to do with the sun to do with weather systems but volcanoes how have people managed to stay standing so trying to think about the history of our relations of the human relationship with the

with the with the natural world there you go and so a huge book uh and uh the earth transformed now you call this an untold story in the title. Why is this an untold story? Well, there are lots of great environmental historians, but generally people in my world as professors tend to work on one particular period or one particular region. So it's untold insofar as I start at the beginning,

and I mean literally the beginning, the world's creation, and bring it through to the world of today. And so it's quite a big chronological range. Most historians, again, tend to focus on one region, you know, one continent maybe, but there are lots of places in the world we can learn from that we just don't learn about in school, in Oceania, in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Americas before the Europeans got there. So trying to be more like that, that's, I think, a big sweep geographically.

But the third, I guess, most interesting thing is that in my world, history, when I was a kid, was all about reading books, learning what dead people wrote about in the past, and occasionally looking at buildings they lived in that are old. But in the world of history right now, the things that are moving fastest are the sciences. So looking at migration, how people are moving, you now don't just have to work out how many people arrived on the east coast of America and went westwards. You can look at genetics about who's marrying whom or who's reproducing where and how and how frequently and how well. You can measure through tooth enamel or through bones what people are eating. You can look at things to do with past climate changes about how full lakes were.

For example, Salt Lake is 20 feet lower than it was at its peak, rather, average peak. And so you've got lots of data now that you can think about the past in a different way. So it's untold because a lot of those tools are really pretty new because the scientists have made lots of gallops forward that's making historians like me

think hard about what skills you need to study study history you mean all those idiot cavemen who wrote all these histories were wrong they didn't uh get molecular molecular biology right so i did i've done i did a bit a little bit on those cavemen and the thing that was interesting about the caves is those guys are all of our kind of common ancestors they worked out very carefully where to put the fire in the middle in the cave that it would cause the least amount of toxicity for them and once they kind of worked out where to put it that information seems to be passed on from generation to generation so that they may not have had the most exciting diet or friday evenings or bank holiday weekends but. But the way in which knowledge was passed along was, I think, was quite interesting

even 40, 50, 60, 70,000 years ago or more. There you go. So I'm an atheist. So you probably started when the world began around Adam and Eve. And then you probably, like, no one ever talks about how Noah got, like, all the microbes on the ark, at least two in pairs, and other things like that. So you probably cover that right in the book. Yes.

Well, I do the creation from the beginning of geological time, so four and a half billion years ago. Even for your listeners who are not atheists, will understand the same story, which is that God created the world to be perfect and then put humans in absolutely last and then when they when they messed it all up they got punished environmentally and ecologically but in in the kind of way i tell it the those that flood of noah isn't just a bible story

it's also in quran and other religious texts it's also in mesopotamia chronic so chronicles written in what's now iraq which is one of the earliest civilizations. Texts in Egypt writing about this enormous flood. And forget about the animals and I guess the microbes probably inside the animals will be my guess. I won't stop around. What about the dinosaurs? How do you get

them on the ark? I think the vegetarian ones are probably okay. There was obviously some massive blood events to do with exceptional levels that scared people in the past. And it scared to the point that they wrote it. Well, first, they tried to understand why it happened. And for them, it was all about them being God punishing them.

But also they wrote it down so future generations would be aware that this might come towards them. So it's been around for a long time. People have worried about changing climates there you go we've had changing climate here in utah as you mentioned earlier with the great salt lake and we've had like this i've the record snowfall i believe that we've ever had here and so now i'm building an ark actually make sure you've got plenty of water and and make sure you've got all your netflix films downloaded because if the wi-fi goes down in the flood you've got to make sure it's on your tablet ready to watch we've got a starlink uh elon musk starlink for the ark um but the one thing i'm having a

problem figuring out is uh if you remember the old bill cosby bit what's a cubit so give us some tease outs of some of the stories or findings that are in the book so we can entice people to want to pick it up. Okay. Well, I'll give one good example is the Roman Empire. People remember from that great gladiator. That's a great film with the Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix. I gathered, in fact, today, hot off the press, that Pedro Pascal is in discussions to make a follow-up. So I guess that'll be gladiated

before he before he dies maybe the early years but the roman rome went to become went from being a kind of important military-powered state with a really strong uh army into a proper empire because partly because of a volcanic eruption in alaska um about two thousand years ago. So Julius Caesar, remember you learned probably a little bit about Julius Caesar at school, you heard his name, that he was killed because he was trying to become king. The men who killed him scattered because people need to take vengeance, you can't just get away with killing, you know, such a senior figure for free. And those who went out to go and pursue them, eventually, as they were going out to pursue this this volcanic eruption took place in alaska that injected huge amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere

and what that tends to do depends on what time of year it goes and the latitude and so on it puts it changes the ways in which the sun's rays can reach our earth it goes without saying right so photosynthesis is harder crops are lower in their yields sometimes they fail altogether and there was an effect in egypt on the nile and the nile is this big big river that every year floods and the waters when they flood produce silt and water over this wonderful produce this grain that is like the midwest are almost unlimited can feed everybody and because there's so much of it it's also cheap and that nile that nile flood failed because of this volcanic eruption and the ruler of Egypt at

that time was a woman called Cleopatra again they're making a film about her at the moment right now that's getting a lot of press and Cleopatra was from a Greek dynasty who'd ruled for the last 200 years she was a woman that made life difficult and the way that the Egyptians kept power in their family was marrying their brothers and sisters which was i think probably not the same as happens in some counties in in the united states it's where you marry your brother and sister to stop other people getting access to power because you don't want to promote anybody else and as a result of that she had to gamble on who was going to win in the race to become the master of rome and she threw a lot in with uh mark hansley played by richard burton in the movie. And she gambled wrong because the guy who managed to screw them both over,

if you excuse my language, was a calculated little weasel of a figure called Octavian. By getting Cleopatra and Mark Antony to either be killed or kill themselves, depending how you see it, he managed to capture the whole of Egypt and take all of the produce of its wheat and its agriculture and its cities and its taxes back to ancient Rome, and it made Rome into an empire. When he died, he wrote on his epitaph, he said, I found Rome built in brick, and I left it in marble.

And amongst the things that also happened in that period, you've already said you're an atheist, but Jesus Christ was born in the reign of this guy whose whose new name was given was called augustus he is the hero by the way of of mark zuckerberg he's the one that mark zuckerberg models his story on so in the in the facebook version of this story egypt is instagram it's the bit that everybody likes and wants to use or maybe whatsapp and it's what made rome into a huge empire so there were lots of reasons for that rome's politics julius caesar these particular individuals cleopatra her greek ancestry but this volcanic eruption played a role and quite often there's there's something involved in

natural world things that pushes on and pushes on into the real world so i'll give you one other quick example chris can i let me uh pause you there uh to get something in um you know that's interesting because i've always heard you know i'm a big marcus aurelius fan uh is it marcus aurelius yeah i'm getting old uh you know i keep the meditations yeah uh right at all times i'm a stoic uh i love stoicism yeah ryan holiday writes writes some great books. And so I didn't know that about the, the, you know, I've,

I've always heard the Cleopatra story and, you know, how she seduced a lot of the Roman guys and, and, and all that stuff. But I didn't know about that scientific thing. Right. So it's interesting.

It's self-preservation. You know, that's what, if you're, if you're vulnerable, you want to make sure you've got support everywhere. So that's not just, you know, she's a, the way it was told in the past,

she's a woman, she can't control her own emotions. It's more, if you're a leader in a precarious position, you want to make sure you're not going to get knocked over from any of your elites inside your country,

let alone from those outside. So that eruption is a kind of, it's a factor. It's not perhaps the determinant one these things would have all been there anyway might have happened anyway but it it just meant that when the nile flood failed the prices of crops went up inflation went up as a result the people who suffer most are always the poor when that happens the cost of living because it's a real thing back then too and that means that people what were quite interested in in a change

of direction and if the change of direction better still doesn't come from somebody Egyptian, then the most powerful families don't have to decide which one of them takes power. Actually having an outsider come back in to replace her is quite an elegant solution, too. So I think it's how we think about history. It's trying to make sure we always factor that in. And that's the same actually in the present day, too, today, too. So, for example over here in europe we've got we're living through a a current really bad war where the russians have

evaded ukraine and one of the drivers for that again was the earthquake of fukushima in 2008 which produced that awful tsunami that killed so many people in japan but one of the effects of that had is it startled the green lobby in Europe that said, look, nuclear power is really dangerous because if a reactor ruptures, millions of people are at risk. And so Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany at that time, decided to shut down all German nuclear power and say, it's OK, guys, we don't need that. It's dangerous. Plus, I get to look green. We can get unlimited gas and natural gas and oil from our friends in Russia. And in fact, we'll build a new pipeline. And so Mr. Putin thought, great, we've now got 60% of all German energy comes from us in Russia.

Either we can turn off the taps or make the Germans pay, but they're never going to send tanks or get in the way. And the Germans have taken a really long time to lean into what they should be doing in Ukraine because of that dependency. So again, that earthquake wasn't the cause, wasn't the reason why Putin invaded, get to lean into what they should be doing in ukraine because of that dependency so again that earthquake wasn't the cause wasn't the reason why putin invaded but it's absolutely definitely a factor in what has happened here in europe in the last 12 months that's pushed energy prices around for you guys in the united states like it has done for us here you could almost compare you correct

me if i'm wrong because you're from england but you could almost compare what what what uh you know the eu did buying uh you know helping fund and flood uh russia with money i mean because all it is is a gas station and all russia is a giant fucking gas station and uh flooding him with money to give him the money to fight the ukraine war you could almost equate that to the same thing england was doing by selling uh airplane parts and engines and all the shit to hitler before the war you know churchill was going hey what the fuck are we doing like yeah it's money man uh you know whatever yeah we did we did the same thing so i mean we i say you know it's a long time ago to you guys in the in the in the colonies in the united states yeah and uh you know, in due course, those United States got strong enough to say, we're going to do this our own way. And again, I write about that in my book

too. One of the kind of, one of the key reasons, which I wasn't told about at school around why the United States declared independence and got away with it, wasn't just about no taxation without representation, which, you know, everyone understands that. It was also that the hurricane seasons in the 1760s and early 1770s were really, really bad in the Caribbean and the southern part of the United States, which at that time was French and Spanish. And merchants in Philadelphia were being told by the government in London that they weren't allowed to sell goods and materials to the Spanish and the French because they were England's competitors at that time. And people living in the colonies are like, well, number one, your problems in Europe have got nothing to do with us.

Number two, as one scholar put it, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. So why would you not want to sell your food at marked up prices and make a fortune for yourselves? And that was one of the first reasons why the Congress was set up, was to try to make decisions that would benefit people living in American colonies. Again, partly to do with the fact that these islands like Cuba had been ravaged by such bad hurricanes, people couldn't eat. And when people can't eat, they're prepared to pay top dollar to get what they need. And that's a bonanza if you're on the right side of the equation. So these kind of stories around how climate patterns, etc.,

feed into how we should think about history. It's, it's about putting all that back in as, you know, back into the story, maybe, maybe one level above the footnotes, but they're always, it always should be there. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I love history and I love the authors like yourself that come on the show that talk about history, because the one thing that we can learn from history is that man never learns from his history, but there's so many important lessons and to me i've always loved history because it's a it's a huge strategy chessboard with a lot of moving pieces and so what you're doing i guess with the book is filling in those pieces from a science a new science-based sort of thing to go hey there were there were other moving pieces

in this and and and maybe that wasn't told in previous history because these idiots that came in were writing on walls and telling stories where they were, I don't know, high on a biscuit or something like that. Yeah, that's right. And I think that look at changes. The Spanish who settled Florida for the first hundred years wrote back to the king of Spain saying, this place is so freaking freezing, we can't live here it's too cold and

it's not just because they're Spanish the Spanish have nice weather and nice climate it's because it was significantly cooler in that time and those changes are ones that that we don't sort of think about we know with Henry VIII or George Washington or the Romans was the temperature about the same did it rain the same amount was Was it stable? How do people cope with stress? And one of the things that climates do, like you've had, you know, these snowstorms in L.A. in March and, you know, huge droughts followed by massive rains. It's really hard to adapt to those kinds of shocks. It's not impossible, but it's normally quite expensive. And you don't know what you're planning for, whether one year you're going to have too much rain and one the next. And that's the bit that's really hard for humans is to cope with sudden shocks to

your household budgets, sudden shocks to your environmental budgets. Yeah. And I imagine, I mean, there was, Ingram was doing a lot of stripping of minerals and just about anything off of us. It was basically a resource grab. And that was probably one of the other factors, wasn't it? I don't know. think that that's that's all an empire is yeah that's what amazon is that's what the roman empire was that's what that's what you know the mogul empire that's what russia is that's all set on amazon i guess nowadays huh well or or other similar type of digital businesses it's always about trying to control resource and sometimes that resource could be data often it's environmental sometimes it's manpower or human labor but it's always about

how do you get things from your periphery and cycle them back to the center and that's that's no different to that that's the same kind of pathology for all empires in britain we were pretty good at doing that ironically the weakness of the british empire despite the fact they covered a quarter of the globe 100 years ago is it didn't have a single piece of proper oil that was exploitable so it meant that the british needed to get involved in the middle east which we then successfully screwed up with a bit of help from our american cousins and you know it's got plenty of people locally who can screw it up for themselves but it didn't help the way in which it was carved into a series of states at the end of the First World War to suit where we thought oil lay and how well we thought we'd be able to get it for our motor industries, Royal Navy,

et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And we're seeing, you know, it's been, I've been hearing about climate change for a long time, and now it's just become really obvious to everybody. I mean, you know, we talked about the Salt Lake City thing, how the snowfall and rainfall has finally come in. In fact, my friends in California had like, you know, flooding because they had massive rainfalls and the reservoirs seem to be rising. But, you know, we're seeing rising seawaters and stuff. People are starting to see problems with that. You know, it's becoming really obvious

that something is not working. And so there's the political aspect of it and that flows into it. There's migrant activity that, of course, has issues with right-wing and left-wing people going, ah, this, that, and the other. I just saw that there's maybe a new migrant surge at the border and the Biden administration

is sending more people down to deal with that. And, of course, I'm sure migration has something to do with you know what's going on with environments and like you said people having food and access to clean water and all that stuff and it's really interesting how all of those moving pieces in the chessboard play together yeah and i don't know whether it's it's it's it's neither good nor bad it's just that that's what it is you know i mean uh you know they're they're but what what studying history will tell you is that we we're not seeing anything new this has all happened before um and often those outcomes are really really bad so the equivalent of new york city 2 000 years ago 3 000

years ago they're not there anymore they're just a set of brick walls right they're gone because they couldn't adapt they couldn't adapt to inbound migration. They couldn't adapt to water pressure. They couldn't adapt to disease. They couldn't adapt to all sorts of different things. And so, but the same things always, it's about resource scarcity. It's about political decision-making.

It's about inequality because it's not, unfortunately, distributed equally when there are crises. Migrations, funnily enough, they tend to be slightly different usually people don't get up and leave they normally try and make stuff work until it's impossible and then then starvation can happen famines and in places like india there were repeated famines which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions in some

cases um where because people want to stay with their families they don't want to leave their homes it's it's a real wrench to do so and it's quite hard to travel in really large numbers because having 20 000 people camped by a wall in the southern part of the united states has problems of its own so uh so but migration is likely to be part of something that we see in the future for sure yeah it's interesting how people i think what i was leading to is how people vote and their geopolitics and everything else just like the cleopatra rome uh thing um you know i i didn't understand we've been a globalized economy now for a while i didn't understand how important ukraine was to to everything you know uh green production sunflower seeds are a big thing i guess sunflower oil i didn't realize how much that goes into stuff. And just a simple war like that, I mean, it's not a simple war. I don't mean

to minimize it or the loss of life, but it's interesting how something like that, I think there's, I can't remember what crops in China have been having a hard time lately, but it's interesting how all this plays out in the giant chessboard of life between politics and environment and everything else. And just what's on probably people's kitchen tables and what they're dealing with as families and what they can afford in food, et cetera, et cetera. that the future of, and, and, and the future of maybe our economies or the great things that are going to come out as new businesses or economies are going to be ones that fight climate change, help climate change, help resolve some of the issues of what we've created.

Do you, do you, do you, do you have hope in humanity to accomplish that? Or are we just fucked? I think, I think, I think,

I think we're not, we're not all in it equally and together. I mean, so you guys in the United States, you've got one land border that people are going to migrate through and that's your border with Mexico. That's it. I think we're not all in it equally and together. So you guys in the United States, you've got one land border that people are going to migrate through, and that's your border with Mexico. That's it.

Those Canadians sneak in. Those Canadians, I think probably it's the other way around. I imagine over time, if projections work out as they are, you'll find Americans moving northwards. Yeah, that's usually what we're doing. Maybe even into Canada. So I'd keep Trudeau on speed dial and make sure he's happy. But you've got one direction

that people will come or do come. We in Europe, it's a different story. We're connected to Asia. We're connected to Africa. We're connected to these massive movements of people. So I think there are different challenges. Most migration and refugees tend to spill into the next door country

and stay there hoping that they'll come back. But yeah i have hope look i think i think we as a species are extremely inventive very resourceful we're quite good in a crisis you know even even covid my own university we had a functional vaccine before the end of march 2020 which is just as we were locking down here in the uk a vaccine was was viable we then had to test it and scale it and distribute it. But, you know, we're quite good at solving big problems. But solving problems when you're doing them at speed is super expensive because you've got to try lots of things at the same time. Some of them are not going to work. And it also means that working out which is the right way to

implement them is a challenge too. So with things like sea level rise, with climate, with food, China, you know, China being busy buying food supplies from all over the world on long-term contracts, paying up front, you know, we've all got to work out what are our vulnerabilities, what are our opportunities, how do we protect farmers, how do we protect our own food supplies? And those things are tricky. You know, like california it's about half of the whole half of the fruit crop of the entire united states comes to california so with terrible drought then taking water out of aquifers and depleting long-term water stocks even if it rains a lot this spring and this summer this fall you know there are there are consequences so it's understanding what your budget is and working on what's your plan b and your plan c and And I think, funnily enough, Putin has played a role in that.

We're so worried about that. We're so worried about what China is doing. But finally, people are trying to think, what does the United States PLC, or what does the United States look like in the long run? And what kind of questions are we not asking? Because this world of today, if we'd been talking before the pandemic, we'd have thought the world was hanging together hanging together pretty well apart from afghanistan maybe but right now with ai with china with climate with russia with energy with bipartisanship with half you know your country thinking the other half are dangerous

which is what we think you know i mean we're hoping the king is going to fix that this weekend we have a we have a coronation maybe we'll all dance around holding hands again but you know these are quite it feels like quite a dark moment for us all deglobalization uh costs going up and you know i think we that that that moment of thinking we're in trouble is where humans are actually quite good at then digging in it's it's where you're you think the world's never going to end and the candy's going to keep on flowing or the candy doesn't flow you know the the kool-aid is going to keep on flowing that when that's the really hard bit but these last few years have been quite sobering for us. They have.

And you know, the one thing I hate, and this is why I promote history and learning from history is it seems like we always wait till like the shit hits the fan. Like then we're like, yeah, we should probably do something about it now. You know?

You would say, look, I write in, I write in, in the sixth century, there's a huge plague, far worse than coronavirus. It probably kills somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the population of europe north africa so mass mortality and there's something very similar about 600 years later

called the black death which of course you'll know about your listeners will know about that does roughly the same thing both of those two put in social distancing, alert systems, far better than anything we did in the world of high-tech 21st century. So in Milan in the 1500s, the warning systems for making sure that you could detect incidents as a plague, anything that looks suspicious with rodents or other small animals that help carry the plague bacterium on parasites and on bugs and things, much better at keeping an eye out for it. But because we'd sort of forgotten that that was important,

we figured that globalization meant you could get laptops made cheaply in China. And that was great because a cheap laptop is a good laptop, particularly if it's high quality. We forgot to think that if people sitting on an airplane flying from Utah to New York starts coughing, the whole plane might get infected with something. We sort of forgot that those natural wells are a part of where we inhabit. And funnily enough, people four or 500 years ago understood that much, much better than when ships came in,

they would have to quarantine. You want to make sure that they're not bringing any nasties alongside all their goods in the hold of the cargo. So we just got to relearn some of that stuff. That's why the history is so important. Yeah, definitely. The one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. And that's why we go around and around as we always say. So these are important aspects. Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go? No,

look, you know, I, we have a slightly different view of how, what we think people in the United States think about climate change. We tend to think over here that there are a lot of people who get very hot under the collar about what climate change is, that they'll say, look, societies can cope with warming, it's nothing to worry about. And, you know, I'll tell you as a historian, that's not the case. That's why you're sitting in Utah, not in ancient

Rome, you know, which is a beautiful city to visit, but it's no longer the centre of a great global empire. The United States would probably claim to be the world's greatest superpower by quite a long shot, I'd have thought, and is. So that process of failing to adapt is kind of how we think about history. I think we think over there that you guys in the States are, you know, we find it quite hard to understand some of your attitudes towards things like guns, towards things like your constitution, towards things like, you know how how people are really

rich think that it's a crime to pay taxes so i recognize that the ecosystem that i'm talking to sounds and looks very familiar but it's very different to how we do things but again the the point i think with history is is not to come in with an agenda that i'm trying to tell everyone we're doomed or we're saved but it's to it's to be open-minded about reading about the past and being informed to make your own conclusions about what you think is good or bad. For example, a single pair of jeans requires about 7,500 litres of water to make.

So that's about the average adult human's consumption of water for seven years. That's not necessarily bad. That's not necessarily good. That's just a fact that is probably quite useful to know in a world where maybe water is already quite scarce. Or if you live in a place that's got necessarily good that's just a fact that it's probably quite useful to know in a world where maybe water is already quite scarce or if you live in a place that's got tons of water that's fine if the jeans are made there but you probably don't want them made in places where where the water is difficult so i'm just an educator so my job is to give people information what decisions

they want to make who they want to vote into office because parts of the world that we're talking about we get to vote our legislators in and and half the world I work on, you don't. And we have a chance to ask for change if we want it, but I think, therefore, it's all the more important in democratic worlds for people to be really well-educated so they can choose what they want and choose their futures. Yeah, it's like that CBS or NBC PSA, the more you know. Before you go, do you write about your thoughts on the new electronic cars and stuff?

And what's interesting to me is how much work goes into make those batteries. And even if one catches on fire, and they catch on fire evidently more than most cars, it takes a lot more water to put it out and even then i mean we have to over here we're sinking them in pools and shit to for 48 hours or a week or something because they can still catch fire what's your thoughts on that are we really saving the environment with electric cars or are we just funny evs have two main environmental downsides. One is they're quite a bit heavier than regular cars.

And that means that the wear of their tires is much higher than it is of a regular petrol diesel car. And that in turn means that the air quality is degraded with PM2, so particulate matter. So very small little specks of dust that are very closely linked to self-harming, cognitive problems, shorter life expectancies, cardiovascular stuff. So heavier cars produce more of that stuff, measurably so. And so that's

one thing we've got to keep an eye on. The other one is that if you're not drilling gas out of the ground, you need a lot more metal to be able to make some of these, not just the batteries, but the cars themselves and the components. So that metal's got to come from somewhere too. And clean mining is not easy because typically, whether you're mining, as we've spoken about, gold or other minerals, you've got to get rid of your tailings and you've got to dump them somewhere.

And those quite often find their way into water systems. So EVs are cleaner in some ways because they don't burn carbon, but there are different footprints that they leave. The competition for copper in particular, but also lithium for the batteries and other components is acute and will be like oil. It'll make some countries super rich. It'll make some individuals super rich. And that's a geological lottery of who that is uh as it happens i've got one of my colleagues at my university who's working on new battery technologies that could improve by a thousand times battery efficiency he's a kind of young genius uh so you know that all these things they go in sort of moves and waves and cycles but the ev stuff it's not a kind of straight clean win

even if you could recycle if there are no fires if you could recycle, if there are no fires, if you can recycle them, because of the heaviness and the materials that go into making them. But the carbon stuff is the immediate problem we've got to try and solve too. And then China's production with its coal plants and I think it produces, what, 50% of pollution in the world? Yeah, something like that.

I saw something on that and I don't have the facts on that. So 496 out of the 500 most polluted cities on earth are in Asia, mainly in India and China. And in those parts of the world, in fact, there's quite a lot of environmental pressure groups, particularly in China, to demand cleaner air. Because no one, particularly when you get richer, you make more demands of your government, even in Communist Party states.

And so environmental protest has been quite an important part of Chinese political activism richer you know you make more demands of your government even in communist party states and so environmental protest has been quite an important part of chinese political activism for the last 20 or 30 years which which does sometimes go on despite what we might might think so china's putting a lot of money into green technologies but the coal stuff is is a problem and some of the coal for that china gets its energy from they're putting outside china so it doesn't sit on their school card but fits in places like pakistan too so uh the environmental stuff there in in the developing world is is hard but the scale of these countries i think it's almost unimaginable to you guys in the u.s so in the u.s there are 10 cities that have a population of more than a million people in china there are 156 cities

with more than a million people wow that's just a lot of energy that's needed. Everybody keeping their refrigerators going, everybody charging their laptops at night, watching TV. All those technological demands put huge pressure on your energy consumption. And the International Energy Agency reckons that global energy

needs are going to double in the next 20 years. And that energy's got to come from somewhere. So the more we can do really cheaply and environmentally safely obviously the better for everybody yeah you mentioned india and at the beginning of the show i was actually one of my queued up questions was recently india it looks like china has really fucked itself by its one one child policy and they're trying to correct it but it looks like they've created the same sort of spiral downward uh that japan is going through right now and uh with generational and and and being able to to keep up you know a country that is growing is dying same thing with the business um and it looks like india just passed i think it was last week or two weeks ago india just passed

in size of population china and so everyone is always like, China's rising, China will be the future economy of the world. I heard by 20, I think 10 years ago, I heard by 2025, China will be the largest market and they'll beat us and outpace us. But now it looks like India really is the thing. Well, China's economy, these things, so China's economy has been growing fast, but per capita income in China is only $10,000. So it doesn't it's still not a rich country. There are obviously billionaires that seem to be everywhere in some of these big cities driving cars that are unbelievably expensive.

But because there are 1.4 billion people in China actually averages out, it's quite a low. It's a low to medium income country. India has, like you said, has got a a young population median age in india is 28 so you've got a lot of young people and that's very exciting because that's mouths to feed that's tech to buy that's people have gone holiday and to travel and disposable income in india has risen through the roof so uh 30 years ago there were two million people had a disposable income, 2 million households, I should say, disposable income of $10,000. There are now 120 million people with disposable incomes of $10,000. And in the last seven years, the number of measured as extreme poor in India fell

from 120 million to 15 million. So there's still terrible poverty in India. But India has been galvanizing really fast. Its traditional weakness has been bad investment infrastructure, roads, the bureaucracy, etc. But even some of that has been the spending has gone up dramatically and the results have gone up. So India's in the process of trying to work this out, but it's got to race against the clock too, because it

too is energy inefficient and energy short. It needs to import a lot of its energy resources. It's okay on the food, but it's hugely water-stressed because there's 1.4 billion people. That's a lot of visits to the toilet every day. That's a lot of visits.

There's a lot of bathing to do, and that's a lot of stuff going into rivers. That is the real Achilles heel that India has. It's very dependent on water coming down from the Himalayas every year. Low snowfall, glacier melts uh low rain levels can and low monsoons can have a dramatic impact on what india's future might look like but it looks like things be going the right direction and and it needs to do something about its caste system which which evidently is getting cracks

maybe they need an iron lady what was The social political system in India right now, it's really tricky. A lot of journalists are in jail in India. There's a real sort of revival of Hindu nationalism that is dividing citizens, not just because of caste, but also because of religious backgrounds, perceived loyalty to India and those outside India.

And it's a type of transition for india looking really for figuring out what its future will be but i guess if you were benign you'd say join the club you know what that's what the next presidential election is is you know what is america there you go questions is it a global superpower or is it something that should turn itself maybe more inwards we've got that problem here in europe right now about are we joined at the hip to the US? Are we a separate power? Should we be making friends with China even though that gets people in the White House very, very angry? How do we deal with Russia?

The US has been helping, but India, Africa is on the move, Sub-Saharan and North Africa. So I think we're all facing quite thorny questions and trying to do exams under pressure. You don't always get the best answers. Well, hopefully King Charles can solve all that because he

seems like the guy who will. I'm sure he's a fine man. And if you guys in the US feel that we're going in the right direction and want to rejoin, you let me know and I'll put in a good word. There was a time a few years ago where we were thinking about that. It might be a good idea. But, you know,

we seem to be coming back. But, you know, I'm just glad you guys got a prime minister that, you know we're over we seem to be coming back but uh you know i'm just glad you guys got a prime minister that you know stayed more than a week uh so this is being broadcast we might regret that we we went we went through i mean i don't know it felt like we went through kind of teenage wobble you know yeah but we're back it's all under control the great thing about britain is it somehow, somehow it all works. You know, I'm in a university that's been going for 800 years, and there's not a day that goes by where I wonder how does it all stay together. We're 38 different colleges. We've got multiple different faculties trying to explain who we are to an outside and how things work, what gown you should wear on what day.

Almost impossible. And yet here we are, you know, still winning nobel prizes and doing all right as obama used to say the uh he referred to us but i think it's true britain too i mean we're a country that zigzags and we go back and forth and sometimes we do stupid stuff and sometimes we do good stuff and and it's kind of a as we say in our constitution it's the it's a drive for a perfect union which we'll never achieve but you know we're trying to get there. Or we think we are. I don't know. Like a marriage. You can always do better.

Yeah. I mean, we're the asshole Americans. We're always going to probably have that moniker the way we go. And everyone hates us around the world and loves us at the same time. It's a weird dichotomy that we have. I always tease my Canadian friends. I'm like, you know, you guys are the nice ones up in Canada. And we're like your drunken brother who just goes around

and starts fights around the world, and you guys are up there going, for fuck's sakes, these guys, why do we have to be next to them? Like, they just come up to us. Like I said, if these projections are right, and I suspect they probably are, be as nice to as many Canadians as you can, because you might need those friends to be grateful for that one day. For the health care, yeah.

Yeah, just show you're doing a little bit better. Yeah better yeah just try hard i'd be willing to be forced to use pronouns for the healthcare you know you give me a great idea though at the show i'm not even kidding uh your jokes about ai um i just realized that i could process the chris voss show and take the text and put it into probably chat GPT and have it all turned into India language and other languages and then repump it back through the video and you and I would be probably I don't know if it would be proper

because you got to be careful. I think it's okay. I think it's pretty good. But I could probably do that and make the show appealing to other countries even though we're seen around the world. Do I get 10%? We'll work on something. We'll have our attorneys contact again but you know uh we'll see what the indian people think about what we said about in the chinese and i'll get hate mail or something i don't know anyway thank you very much peter for

coming on the show this has been a delightful and insightful delightful insightful that should be in the name of the podcast uh show uh give us your dot com so people can find you on the internet. I'm on Twitter at Peter Frankopan and my web address is www.peterfrankopan.com. And my book is available in all good shops all around the world. There you go. The Earth Transformed. You may have heard of it. You're walking on it right now. An Untold History, available April 18th, 2023.

And check out his other books. He's got the Silk Roads, a new history of the world, the new Silk Roads, and quite a few other books that you should check out as well. I'll learn from history people, the smarter you are, the sexier you are. And you know, that always works for people. I don't know. People always looking to be sexy. They buy cars and everything and they, they do all this stuff.

Read books, be smart. People like you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in to my audience. We certainly enjoy you having here as well for the show, your friends and family. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you.