Dwarkesh Patel: preference

Transcript context

…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? Homo sapiens is 200,000 to 300,000 years old. We emerge in Africa and disperse, multiply, but we spend 90, 95% of our history as foragers. People who are hunter-gatherers, who take energy from wild food sources, rather than sedentary farmers who've domesticated plants and animals and live a sedentary lifestyle where you're enslaved to this wheat or rice, but it gives you reliable calories. That is along with the Industrial Revolution, and then whatever this thing we're about to go through, the biggest change in the history of our species. The shift from foraging to farming affected everything. It affected our beliefs. It affected our genetics. We're all basically genetically different, adapted to live in a different kind of environment with different kinds of diets. It affected our societies, it affected inequality, it affected culture in every possible way, and of course it affected our health in really basic ways. It affected our labor regime; doing the same kind of labor over and over every day is very different from running around as a hunter, chasing deer or whatever, which sounds quite nice. It changed our labor regimes. It changed our diet, most of all. Hunter-foragers tend to eat high protein, high fat-ish diets, with no refined carbohydrates, but limited carbs. It's a very varied, highly varied diet. Sedentary farmers tend to eat more monotonous diets and they tend to be dependent on grains and starches, so a very narrow spectrum for your calories. Changes in labor regime, changes in the diet, and then changes in lifestyle, being sedentary and living in big populations that then puts you in proximity to other humans, puts you in proximity to human waste. Feces are a major conduit of infection. It puts you into proximity to the air they breathe, which is conducive to respiratory diseases. This transition, which takes thousands of years, is more of a process than an event. It has massive implications for human health, including the infectious disease environment that we inhabit. It's not like hunter-gatherers were living in paradise. The infectious diseases that they had were seriously burdensome, they sucked, and probably most people died of infectious disease. Malaria is a really old disease. Lots of diseases existed in the Pleistocene, in our Paleolithic past. It's not like it was Eden. There is this idea that the transition from foraging to farming... Jared Diamond called it humanity's biggest mistake. Certainly these changes entailed some things that were not net positive for humanity and one of them is that it definitely increased the infectious disease burden. Simply as our population multiplies and as we're in contact with feces and as we're sharing the air through which respiratory pathogens can spread, diseases are constantly trying to take advantage of this. That's just how nature works. Energy is scarce. Everybody's trying to steal it from everybody else, including microbial parasites.…

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