Dwarkesh

But this thing, which is causing 20% mortality, you only get like in the 17th, 18th century, uh,

Yeah.

Okay.

And then asking about where different countries were at around this time, what evidence do we have about what was actually happening in India before the British or the Mughals?

Because it does seem to be the sort of black box in terms of historiography, but what

Like do we know if there were these huge plagues?

It's a special kind of honor.

Yeah.

The deadliest agent in human history.

Huh.

And I mean, I know the way we found that the Yersinia pestis existed in these Yamnaya 4,500 years ago is by, didn't they just find like the, I don't know how, but like if you can figure that out, why can't you look at the fossils of people 500 years ago or 1,500 years ago and just see if they have Yersinia pestis in them?

And just to be clear for the context.

Ancient.

Ancient.

Going forward to the future a little bit.

Yeah.

Speaking of future technology, maybe the one that's more relevant than AI is synthetic biology.

And there's a worry that you can potentially create diseases which...

Maybe the evolutionary gradient is one that is, like, not catastrophic, where diseases are incentivized to be transmissible but keep you at a chronic level of infection that doesn't necessarily kill you immediately.

Actually, it's interesting why the bubonic plague diverges from that selection pressure, which maybe you can answer, but...