Dwarkesh

And this is exactly what the market provides.

Today, I have the pleasure of chatting with Kyle Harper, who is a professor and provost emeritus at the University of Oklahoma and the author of some really interesting books, The Fate of Rome, Plagues Upon the Earth, Slavery in the Late Roman World.

upcoming one called The Last Animal.

The reason I wanted to have you on is because I don't think I've encountered that many other authors who can connect biology, economics, history, climate into explaining some of the big things that have happened through human history in the way you can.

The most recent reason I wanted to have you on is I interviewed David Reich, the geneticist of ancient DNA, and some of the questions we were discussing, he kept emphasizing this

overwhelming role and surprising role that diseases have had in human history, not just in the recent past, but, I mean, in his work going back, like, thousands of years, tens of thousands of years.

And he's like, you've got to have Kyle on.

I email him afterwards, like, who should I interview next?

And he's like, you've got to have Kyle on.

You have this graph in The Fate of Rome.

Yeah, you show human population over the last few thousand years.

I assume that these two downspikes are both the bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, right?

Yeah.

And so this is not like some small little nudge you can see.

Like the overwhelming, I mean, other than the hyper-exponential growth in human population, the overwhelming, not just one, but the overwhelming two major features in human population going back the last 10,000 years is this one bacteria, right?

One of the things you discuss in the book is that the collapse of the Roman Empire was a result of this one particular event, right?

Yeah.

I think you discuss in the book the possibility that the death rate might have been close to or even over 60% wherever the black death – so this is not just like – this is like literally the most significant thing.

Yeah, it's mind-blowing.

Right.