Dwarkesh

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.

What do you make of the general argument that people have often made that we were living in a sort of Eden before agriculture, especially given your...

You know, you've explained that all these diseases that we're sort of stuck with are actually quite new.

If we take that perspective seriously, was life before human population exploded and we had agriculture just much more pleasant, at least in comparison?

Homosapiens is 200,000 to 300,000 years old.

James Scott has an interesting theory in Against the Grain.

I don't know if it originates with him, but he argues that one of the reasons that the early agriculturalists were so successful, and David Reich, by the way, if you've seen the stuff about the Amnaya 4,500 years ago, conquer all of Eurasia, but before them, the

The Anatolian, the initial farmers, they're the ones who displaced the initial hunter-gatherers across Europe and Asia.