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

Way worse.

And then there's like certain kinds of fruit which have vitamin C, certain kinds which don't.

So it's like it's actually hard to kind of figure out like what is it if you don't have a mechanistic explanation about how you solve this problem.

And I think they had once figured it out and then they lost the knowledge until it was rediscovered again.

But it makes it all the more mysterious that the kinds of things that Henrik discusses

uh, forager societies having figured out, like literally there's like this 10 step process for how to process a certain kind of bean so that you don't get cyanide poisoning.

Um, and if you mess up any one of those 10 steps, you're going to get cyanide poisoning, but like a society just figures out, you know, the bright taboos and traditions to process beans, but like you can figure that out.

But this thing, which is causing 20% mortality, you only get like in the 17th, 18th century, uh,

Yeah.

Okay.

And then asking about where different countries were at around this time, what evidence do we have about what was actually happening in India before the British or the Mughals?

Because it does seem to be the sort of black box in terms of historiography, but what

Like do we know if there were these huge plagues?

It's a special kind of honor.

Yeah.

The deadliest agent in human history.

Huh.

And I mean, I know the way we found that the Yersinia pestis existed in these Yamnaya 4,500 years ago is by, didn't they just find like the, I don't know how, but like if you can figure that out, why can't you look at the fossils of people 500 years ago or 1,500 years ago and just see if they have Yersinia pestis in them?

And just to be clear for the context.

Ancient.

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