This show is about the systems that make life possible, and how they're now coming apart.

There's nothing in the world more important than the food system.

The 20th century was scarred by gigantic famines.

These weren't natural events.

They were caused in many cases by negligence and the disdain of the political elites.

And famines, like the one happening in Gaza, still go on.

But since the 1970s, the absolute number of people dying in famines

has dropped by over 90%. On a global scale, we now make so much food that farmers sometimes

destroy it to keep prices high. So how is there so much food? And is it all about to fall apart? This week I'm talking to

Charles Mann, the New York Times best-selling author of The Wizard and The Prophet, and the series

How the System Works, about food, electricity, public health and water, systems so important that we barely realize they exist.

Along the way, we'll explore the historic power of bird poop, the Indian scientists who put

wheat in a nuclear reactor, and how the genius who made modern farming possible also invented

the gas that was used to murder millions in the Holocaust.

Welcome to do your own research.

My pleasure to be here, virtually.

So our topic here is the mega machine, the vast complex of systems, from the electrical

grid to public health, to the food distribution system,

to the clean water supply that we all take for granted now, these kind of vast systems.

And hopefully this conversation, I think this conversation will go in lots of different

directions across all those different systems, focusing mostly on food and in public health,

but also on some

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