Dwarkesh

speaker

1,722 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Nov

Dwarkesh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

Like this once-in-a-thousand-year event that's super kind of like just intense.

I found your early chapters in the book about what the Roman economy was like in this happy period quite interesting.

So –

There's a bunch of questions I have about this.

If you read Gibbon writing in the 1770s, I think he says in the 1770s that if you want to look at the happiest time in human history, you go back to this period you're talking about.

This is true, at least according to him, as of a couple centuries ago.

This is still peak civilization.

And you discuss the complexity of the Roman economy, the fact that millions of tons of

wheat and other products have to make their way to Rome and the trade networks and everything.

And then I think you basically say, like, look, they were experiencing productivity gains.

The wages were increasing.

Population was increasing.

But they were still not at the level at which it was plausible that, say, for these climactic and biological factors, they might have had an industrial revolution.

And so I'm curious why you think, like, basically, yeah, paint a picture for me of what, like, the Roman world looked like as of this happy period and why that was still, like, counterfactually not, you know, couldn't have just saved us a thousand years of history if they were on the right track.

If you're like Augustus or some other Roman emperor and you're like, look, we've got this big economy, but I want to see productivity gains and you want to make it happen somehow.

What is it exactly?

Is there something you like from it?

top-down perspective you could have done.

I mean, in Britain, you know, the government subsidizes the royal arts and so forth.

That's what I was going to say.

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