Why Rome actually fell: plagues, slavery, & ice age — Kyle Harper

为何罗马实则覆灭:瘟疫、奴隶制与冰河时代 —— 凯尔·哈珀

Dwarkesh Podcast

2025-04-24

1 小时 23 分钟
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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/dwarkesh To 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
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  • 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, an 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 gotta have Kailan, I emailed him afterwards, like who should I interview next?

  • And he's like, you gotta have Kailan.

  • 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 down spikes are both the bubonic plague or syniapestis, right?

  • And so this is not like...