Dwarkesh
speaker
1,722 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 25 Nov
Dwarkesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper · 24 Apr 2025
podcast
But given that larger size of population.
a slave population, it's surprising to me that there's so few slave revolutions, not only in Rome, but even throughout history.
Like, there's Spartacus in 71 B.C., then there's the Haitian Revolution, I forget when, but, like, probably late 18th.
Yeah, I was 17.
Yeah, okay.
You know, if, like, 20% of the population is enslaved, like, how is this a sustainable... You know, if you're, like, running a farm and there's, like, 4,000 slaves and then, like, the next farmer over also and, like...
Why aren't there more slave rebellions?
Yeah.
Right?
Why not?
Yeah.
And I wonder if we can close the loop with the question we began with, which is, why didn't Rome have an industrial revolution?
I don't know if it's a plausible explanation that cheap slave labor reduced the incentives for mechanization and engineering and other crafts, or if not, I don't know.
Final question about Roman slavery.
What did Gladiator get right and wrong about?
Will they just abduct you in front of your house?
But
On slavery in particular.
Okay, I think that covers all the questions about Rome.
We can get back to your most recent book about human history and plagues.
Showing 661–680 of 1,722 · page 34 of 87
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