Kyle Harper: belief

Transcript context

…But on slavery in particular. On slavery in particular, I think actually that's one of the strong suits of the movie. You see this completely exploitative system that brings people from very different parts of the world who have very different backgrounds. The system of urban spectacle is very real. The use of slave labor in that is certainly a part of it. So the movie actually gets some really important things about that right. That makes it totally forgivable that it has to create a kinda high politics storyline. 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 you've explained that all these diseases that we're sorta 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?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.