800 years before the Black Death, the very same bacteria ravaged Rome, killing 60%+ of the population in many areas.Also, back-to-back volcanic eruptions caused a mini Ice Age, leaving Rome devastated by famine and disease.I chatted with historian Kyle Harper about this and much else:* Rome as a massive slave society* Why humans are more disease-prone than other animals* How agriculture made us physically smaller (Caesar at 5'5" was considered tall)Watch on Youtube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.----------SPONSORS* WorkOS makes it easy to become enterprise-ready. They have APIs for all the most common enterprise requirements—things like authentication, permissions, and encryption—so you can quickly plug them in and get back to building your core product. If you want to make your product enterprise-ready, join companies like Cursor, Perplexity and OpenAI, and head to workos.com.* Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities at scale.com/dwarkeshTo sponsor a future episode, visit dwarkesh.com/advertise.----------KYLE'S BOOKS* The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire* Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History* Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425----------TIMESTAMPS(00:00:00) - Plague's impact on Rome's collapse(00:06:24) - Rome's little Ice Age(00:11:51) - Why did progress stall in Rome's Golden Age?(00:23:55) - Slavery in Rome(00:36:22) - Was agriculture a mistake?(00:47:42) - Disease's impact on cognitive function(00:59:46) - Plague in India and Central Asia(01:05:16) - The next pandemic(01:16:48) - How Kyle uses LLMs(01:18:51) - De-extinction of lost species Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
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?
Well, I mean, the period that I normally work on is sort of from the high Roman Empire, so like the glory days of the Pax Romana in the first or second century, which is usually where I start, through what we call the late antique or early medieval period, so the sixth or seventh century. And at the beginning of this period, Rome dominates this Mediterranean empire.
It's what you think of when you think of Rome. ancient Rome. It's the largest city in the world. It's the center of this huge network. And then by the end of this period, the city of Rome has, we don't know, 50 to 100,000 people. It's a 10th or 20th of its former size. And I think we now can say pretty clearly that
environmental factors like climate, but also especially diseases play a part in that really big transformation. And while there's a problem because we don't have the same kind of modern government mortality statistics that we do for like COVID or even for the last century or century and a half.
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