Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…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, and 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, and 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 and surprising role that diseases have had in human history, not just in the recent past, but in his work going back thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. He said, "You gotta have Kyle on." I emailed him afterwards, asking "Who should I interview next?" And he said, "You gotta have Kyle on". You have this graph in The Fate of Rome. 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.…

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