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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

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.

Anyway, so he argues that initial wave was so successful because of these first, I guess,

Diseases that the farmers had created the conditions to engender.

And basically the relationship we had... Sorry, the relationship these farmers had with respect to the foragers that they were taking over from was similar to the relationship the Europeans had to the Native Americans, where inadvertently the disease is just like a significant player in why you were able to dominate them.

I don't know how plausible you find that.

The point you made about fertility is interesting.

I can't remember where I saw this, and it might be wrong, but I vaguely remember reading that for... It's not just the fact that you're not, like, the energy density is lower.

It's that you're also moving around a lot.

And so that... Because of that, you're spacing out kids much more so than if you're just, like, in the same place.

And I think, like, the actual fertility for foragers is, like, not... Is, like, sort of, like, a reasonable...

I don't know if sustainable is the right word because I don't mean, like, in an ecological sense, but more so in a, like, it, like, keeps your population constant.

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