Pandemic History

The Infectious of Boys of Comedy™ dig into the history of pandemics.

Life on earth started billions of years ago.  Life parasitizing other life, evolved shortly after.  And the endless arms between viruses and hosts began.  This mix of battles and cooperation gave rise to much of the rich complexity and diversity of life in addition to some of its biggest threats.  Early sexual reproduction may even have become more successful than cloning in part to escape disease spread.  And now sex is one of the main ways diseases are spread!

And around and around we go…

Modern civilization has created unique opportunities for viruses and modern medicine has created unique defenses.  Once again, the arms race continues.  Meanwhile, while our biology and psychology haven’t changed much since hunter-gathers so we find our intuitions mismatched for our modern world.

From major events like smallpox, to modern scares like Ebola, to an obscure Australian horse disease, many of the common themes have happened again and again.  At a time when many are turning to the news to get daily updates on jargony talking points to argue over, The IBC™ think it’s worthwhile to look back through the last few hundred years of various epidemics to get some perspective.

Catch this episode on YouTube or your favorite app and you will come down with contagious laughter and be super spreading novel insights in no time.