Kyle Harper

Like that is – the Greek –

Like experiment in math and science is the one that I think had like the better chance of sparking sustained takeoff.

And it didn't.

And it would be interesting to know more about like why.

Why did things stall?

Because these people aren't – you know, like Euclid is not –

just like a towering genius who comes out of nowhere.

He's very much a product of the culture and the questions that are being asked in the generations before.

But it just sort of feels like, you know, after him, you fail to get that kind of sustained, continuous progress and advance.

So maybe sort of back to that big question that we were asking before, like what –

What is it that prevents the kind of breakthroughs that we see in the modern world?

What is the population of Greece during their golden age?

Well, I mean of like the greater Greek world or like individual city-states like Athens.

I mean we think of Athens as being like –

a couple hundred thousand people, like not massive.

Yeah, yeah, there's probably something to that, that like there's just not the critical mass of educated people, of like sheer cognitive power to like keep it going, yeah.

Right.

I mean, slavery, you know, tragically is a really important institution throughout history.

We sometimes tend to think of it as like a distinctly modern phenomenon, but that actually misses—

the deeper picture and in fact it obscures the importance of modern slavery because modern slavery is uniquely important and it's uniquely tied up with certain kinds of market exchange and certain kinds of production, certain kinds of racial ideologies.