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

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