Zombie Apocalypse (Part 2)

The Zombie Apocalypse rages on as Neil deGrasse Tyson hunts for the truth with World War Z author Max Brooks and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and virus expert Laurie Garrett.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist is what I am, and I direct the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York City. My co-host this week Eugene Mirman.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, this is part two of our show on zombies.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, zombies, viruses.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, zombies as a metaphor for the spread of viruses and other infectious diseases. And there was so much to talk about in that last segment. It's spilling over into this hour. And we'd swapped out our guests.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, previously we had an expert virologist, because he told us even what a virus was.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he told us there are viruses that love gold.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to explore just the cultural, political, social ramifications of what happens when you have an outbreak. And for that, we had to find different expertise, and we did. We found Laurie Garrett. Laurie, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and author of the book "The Coming Plague", apparently she knows something that we don't. She won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories she wrote on the outbreak of the Ebola virus.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Oh, that's the one I keep being afraid of.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inside ear, Laurie Garrett, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Thank you, Neil.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Eugene, is he justified in being afraid of Ebola as much as he is?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not like afraid of it like I won't leave the house.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, well, is he, is it justifiable fear of that?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think you're gonna see Ebola virus turning up in New York City anytime soon.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  If ever.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Oh, good. So, great.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  But when I've been in-

• 1:55Speaker 01

  But what about Boston? I go there sometimes. Similar?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  I've been in the middle of Ebola epidemics and the real problem in an epidemic is spread inside of hospitals.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  So, keep people apart. So, one-man hospitals?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  No, it's that we have, and this was true with the SARS virus, I was in China through the whole SARS epidemic and in all those hospitals, and I go to epidemics, that's what I do.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was worried about that.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  The way some people follow the band Phish, you follow epidemics around the world.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There, I thought she caused them. Yeah, I guess. Just happened to be there.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's getting suspicious.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  The accusation has been made by others.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Pull a surprise from it.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, also, for this hour, we're continuing with my clips from my interview with Max Brooks, who is one of the world's, the leading expert in the world on zombies, which we've analogized to Outbreak. And why don't we get to my first clip from him, which puts Outbreak in the context of politics and culture, and then we come right back to Lori. Let's check it out.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  I think the reason the zombie craze is so crazy right now is because we're living in such anxiety-ridden times.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're exploiting those anxieties.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  I started with me. Remember, I didn't-

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're the excuse that you're giving yourself for going down this path.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  I didn't need the global financial meltdown to give me anxiety. I had that anxiety at 12 years old.

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're an anxious kid, but so now this is catharsis for you?

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Well, it is because it's the one apocalyptic scenario that we can feel empowered.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right, because you can actually-

• 3:28Speaker 03

  You can actually-

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come upside their head with a baseball bat.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Right. You cannot hit a credit default swap in the head. You just can't do that.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nor can you hit an unseen virus in the head.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  You can't do it with a virus.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, these are macroscopic viruses.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Right. So, it's the one thing you can actually do something about, because all these anxieties, from 9/11 to Katrina, to swine flu, bird flu, all these things that are hitting us, everybody feels so powerless, especially when a president tells you to go to the mall. So, you really feel powerless. And at least in the zombie plague, you think, okay, here's the one thing where, yes, we can.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, unless you're really inept, you're gonna win a fight with a zombie.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you keep a cool head, and as the British say, "Keep calm and carry on," you'll be all right.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And carry a big stick.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  I was invited to speak at the US Naval War College because the president of the college, Admiral

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, do they know something we don't know?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Well, the part that kept me up at night was

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are they breeding zombies for the next military encounter?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  I wish it was just zombies. Admiral Weiskopf said to me, you know, if you take the zombies out of World War Z, apparently I have presented a very credible step-by-step scenario of how society could unravel. Sleep tight, everybody.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your contribution to this genre is the extent and depth to which you're thinking about the reaction function, if I will,

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of culture, of society, and of people.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Right, because I don't want to do little adventure stories of sort of, there's a group of people and they got some guns and they're gonna go from point A to point B. I want to think, how would the government react? How would you reorganize the economy? How do you feed 100 million refugees when the global supply chain has shut down? And the point that I tried to make in World War Z is that it's a global crisis, because I think there are no real American crises anymore, except maybe Snooki. But, I mean, the problem is, the world's problems are America's problems, and isolationism just doesn't work anymore. So I wanted to also see how other countries might react to a zombie plague, not just the USA.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laurie, are we doing the right thing when plagues break out? Or do we overreact?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Oh, well, it depends which plague and what the nature of the plague is. Black plague. I was in a black plague epidemic in India in 1994, and the reaction was insanely wrong. Insanely wrong. Because now, we know how to deal with plague. We have antibiotics, and it's really simple with penicillin. And what did they do in 94? Oh my god, they went berserk. Was in a place called Gujarat, and a town called Surat, and pretty much everybody that had money and power abandoned the town, and left all the lower caste Indians to themselves with only four or five government doctors. That was it.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  And all the private sector physicians, the Ayurvedics, they all deserted, jumped ship. And the panic that ensued was just phenomenal, and then the government refused to show up, the New Delhi, when the Minister of Health showed up, he jumped off the plane, announced that he had cured his own cancer by drinking his own urine for many years, and jumped back on the plane terrified and left everybody. And then all sorts of people started claiming it was a Pakistani conspiracy and that the Pakistanis had made the plague and released it to kill Indians and it just immediately went geopolitical.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much of this is because there's a profound absence of science literacy?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Science literacy is the...

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Would a pamphlet have helped some of this?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  No, if they could read. No, science illiteracy is absolutely at the root of most insane responses to epidemics, because if you're rational and you know how microbes work, you know how to protect yourself.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you won't drink your urine, once you know how.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Not to cure cancer.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, drinking urine doesn't cure cancer, let's just let people know. I'm not a scientist, but you'll back me up, right?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  I, absolutely, I'm with you.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Are you saying that antibiotics could stop the black plague?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a bacterial disease, Yersinia pestis.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, I think they give that for, for Lyme disease, the same, the same antibiotic regimen. Okay, I read what would, what it cures, and the whole list was like stuff from 500 years ago. I'm thinking, if I ever get a time machine, I'm bringing that stuff back with me.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Well, being a cosmologist, you're the most likely candidate for time.

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm not authorized to divulge, whatever.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yes, you already have done it, we know, Neil.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more of my interview with Max Brooks, world's expert on zombies, and Laurie Garrett, who's gonna tell us how societies react to viral outbreaks. We'll see you in a moment.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. You can find us on the web at www.startalkradio.net. I've got Laurie Garrett in studio with me, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's thought most of her life about the spread of infectious diseases. And in that first segment, she was suspiciously in all the places where there were viral outbreaks.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And she tells us that she was not the cause of them.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  It's her job to cure them. It's a good cover story, I have to say.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm gonna wanna know, what are all the ways to thwart the spread of viruses? And I've got also my interview with Max Brooks. In case you don't know, Max Brooks was like zombie guy. I mean, he wrote The Zombie Survival Guide, and that's a book. Another one, World War Z, but feature-length movies being based on it, starring...

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Brad Pitt.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brad Pitt, so that means you have to watch it.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Mr. Handsome.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. Handsome dude, so you gotta...

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Mr. Angelina Jolie.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  You know what's interesting about that is that the other metaphor for the spread of disease that's been constantly raised is vampires, and certainly the whole...

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I thought you were gonna say Brad Pitt.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  No, but the whole vampire phenomenon is definitely an outgrowth of the HIV epidemic, and Brad Pitt made his career playing a vampire.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  That was his initial breakthrough role, that was his monster role.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Across from, uh, across from...

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tom Cruise, exactly. Interview with a vampire.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  You wanna know an inside trick on that one? They had to dig a trench, deep enough, that when Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt walked side by side, Brad Pitt was shorter than Tom.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, that's what happens when you're the lead.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  It fooled me. Even to this day, I'm like, what a tall man Tom Cruise is.

• 9:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, one big difference between vampires and zombies is that it's a lot harder to kill a vampire. Let's go to my...

• 10:04Speaker 01

  But it's a virus that also spreads.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go to my interview with Max Brooks. Find out all the ways to kill a zombie and see what analogies we can draw to the ways to stop the spread of viruses.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Can a bow and arrow kill a zombie? Yeah, but remember, a bow and arrow has to be used by an archer. You know, Elizabethan archers practiced from boyhood to become a good archer. They were good. You can't just pick up a bow and arrow and go Robin Hood. You know, that does not work. So if you want to become an archer in a zombie plague, you better start practicing right now. Okay, but will one arrow kill him? Oh yeah, it'll go right through. And then kill them. Oh, yeah. I mean, an English longbow actually has more punch than a musket. Hmm, right. And that's what got rid of armor. This longbow just penetrated armor like it was butter. Yeah. So do I have to shoot the zombie in the heart? Through the head, through the brain. Destroy the brain, you destroy the ghoul. That's been the rule since nineteen sixty-eight. And you you sticking with it? I'm sticking with it. So the rest of the body doesn't matter? No, the rest of the body is just the vehicle.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  But the brain is the command center. Okay, so shovel works. Shovel works just fine. You ever know, good hand weapon, good machete? Machetes are the best. Zombies, do they have to stay warm? I mean, can you freeze them out? Can you keep them? What's their? You freeze them, but then they'll fall. So. Oh, because they're they're not alive to be killed. Right, right, right. Right. They're just viruses. They're just viruses. So springtime comes and they're up and at them again. Okay, so you can delay them? You can delay them. Okay, and how about like flamethrowers and stuff? That that'll work, I guess. It works, but think about it. When was the last time you threw a steak on the grill and it burst into flames? No, it doesn't. So you you wouldn't be burning them, you'd be cooking them. You'd need a lot of fire to burn one zombie. Right. In fact, the human body has a lot of fluid in it. You can't just ignite fluid. Right, and most people don't understand. When you die of a burn, you die because the fluid has come out of your body. Right, right.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  So I came up with something in World War Z called your resource to kill ratio, which is literally how much resources you have to use to kill one zombie, because it becomes a war of economics. So you don't have unlimited resources and zombies are coming at you. What's the cleanest, simplest way to kill a zombie? The cleanest way I would say would be to decapitate. With some kind of saber? Some kind of saber, some kind of curved bladed weapon. Because the thing is, even crushing the skull is going to take a lot of effort. You're going to be burning calories. And the truth is, once you decapitated him, the head is still biting. It's a landmine. But it's not it's not mobile. It's not mobile, so step away, because the point is to survive, not to engage. Your job is to escape and evade.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Okay, and a swift cut to the neck is clean and easy and low investment of your own caloric energy. Exactly. It burns a lot less calories than trying to repeatedly bash the human skull, which is one hard shell. But it feels good to watch someone do that. Well, if you can get someone else to do it, which I think is the problem of most industrialized countries, is getting someone else to do our work for us.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you want to conserve your energy because you might have to do this a thousand times.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  And I think that's what people don't understand. Everyone thinks a zombie plague is gonna be like a video game, which is essentially a sprint. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, in a video game, it doesn't count your calories that you've expended to kill what you just did.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Or the amount of water in your system.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Or the-

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Access to water?

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Right, access to water or energy. If you get sleepy and you're gonna start messing up, and remember-

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get sleepy!

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Sleepy, you're gonna sleep. And just think about it, every time you pull a trigger, where is the next bullet gonna come from?

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Who's making bullets?

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Zombies already took out the bullet factory.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Right, I have a lot of people come up to me and they say, "I'll make my own bullets." And I say, "Sir, with all due respect, no you don't. You assemble them from the Cabela's catalog." God bless you, but unless you're smelting the bronze-

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless you're removing the iron ore from the earth.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Unless you're making that powder like Captain Kirk in that episode-

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, with the gorn, yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  With the gorn, you're not making your own bullets, I'm sorry.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Lori, Lori, that was quite a list there for how you stop a zombie. How do you stop an outbreak?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing you have to do is make sure that everybody whose job it is to treat patients and identify who's sick has proper protection to make sure they don't become carriers of the disease.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Medical support personnel.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Medical support personnel, ambulance drivers, you name it, they all need latex gloves, masks, you know, proper equipment.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, first line of defense.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  First line of defense. Then make sure that in the hospitals, all the equipment is sterile and you don't reuse any syringes. A whole lot of epidemics are simply because of reused syringes in poor country hospitals.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the hospital is not the place to get better? Can you sterilize syringes, or you just need more?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Not modern ones. We now use plastic. If you put that in an autoclave, it'll melt.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I won't do that.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, not a good idea.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're made cheap so that you can reuse them without a great cost? I mean, you can dispose of them without great cost to you?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Cost to the environment, but not cost to the individual.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now you've got that, and now how about people themselves? I mean, my great worry is, there's a virus that breaks out and you can catch it airborne. Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Just by thinking about it, that would be the worst.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  The fear itself would kill you.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Well, fear does kill in an epidemic. People behave really stupidly.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  And put themselves at great risk, and I've seen it over and over. You know, in the SARS epidemic, I was in Hong Kong, and there were two major hospitals that the bulk of all the patients went to.

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the, so the start of the SARS was in China?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it started in China and was covered up. It started in November of 2002. We didn't know about it until about this time, 10 years ago.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A government cover up?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, Chinese government cover up, because there was a transition going on between the Jiang Zemin era and the Hu Jintao era. The secret party congress had taken place in November, exactly the same day as the first individual of SARS staggered into a medical facility in Guangdong province. And during this secret conclave, they chose who would be the next successor of power in the Chinese Communist Party. And because they had not had a peaceful transition, and so long nobody could remember, they said, nothing can rock the boat. We have to have total security. So everybody covered up the epidemic until it hit Hong Kong. And it hit Hong Kong because one individual was infected, was terrified, knew what was going down, because he was a doctor.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Staggered across the border, went to a hotel called the Metropole in downtown Hong Kong. Stayed on the ninth floor, and everybody else on the ninth floor that pressed the nine button on the elevator got his disease. They then went, they were travelers, they went to their respective airport destinations and took the virus to Vietnam, to Toronto, Canada, to...

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like the end of the movie Planet of the Apes.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  This is terrifying. I'm like, how am I still alive, even hearing the story?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  And what I saw was that the case in Vietnam, you would think that would have been where there was a really terrible epidemic, because it was a poor country. But actually, they had such bad hospital facilities that the windows were all open, and it diluted the virus in the air, so people weren't coughing at each other. Go to Toronto, where they had high-tech medicine like we have here in the United States, they had a heck of a time getting rid of that epidemic.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Never trust Canadians.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  It just kept spreading inside their hospital.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the hospital had a completely contained environment.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yes, and then in China.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Recirculated air.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  In China, it was that the people didn't trust healthcare workers.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  They're right.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  It's a big.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  They were right.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Well, it was a big ripoff system there. And so people would keep their loved ones at home with the virus and not take them in.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Okay, so they weren't right.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And it spread rapidly, and I went all over China, under the radar, though they had put out the word throughout the Communist Party that if anybody spotted dangerous foreigner Laurie Garrett, I was to be arrested.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Were you arrested?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  No, but my translator was.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Your translator was arrested?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we managed to get pretty much through most of the SARS area of China and document what was going down.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when we come back to StarTalk, I want to talk about vaccines and the cultural resistance to that, that exists presumably in other nations as well, but certainly there's some of that here in the United States.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  We should talk about polio and Al Qaeda.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll go straight there after this break. You're listening to StarTalk Radio, the zombie edition with zombies analogized to viral outbreaks. We'll be right back.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I got Eugene Mirman with me, my co-host.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is the zombie edition. We're talking about viruses with Laurie Garrett, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about this stuff.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's tweeted at Laurie underscore Garrett.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you want to avoid an outbreak, follow her on Twitter. That's how I do it. That's how I've avoided Ebola.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's Garrett with two Rs and two Ts, and she's got a website, LaurieGarrett.com. We're also featuring my interview, obtained at Comic-Con 2012 with Max Brooks, the world's expert on zombies. I've got a question. If you want to stop a virus, typically we think. Think of vaccinating ourselves in advance of this.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your world travels, has there been resistance to vaccinations? Or is it that new viruses come up and we don't have a vaccine yet?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  It's both. Obviously with flu, we've never had vaccine on time to make much of a hill of beans a difference. And the majority of the planet never gets flu vaccine because we only manufacture enough for the people in the rich countries. But in most of the world, the resistance to vaccination comes from one of two places. Either they are from the rich world, they are well educated, they're upper middle class. And they've come to the conclusion, which has absolutely no basis in scientific reality, that their babies will have autism because of a vaccine.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Literally, that's like a specific fear that people have.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I've heard that.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  It started with a guy in the UK named Andrew Wakefield, who claimed to be able to prove this, and it turned out to be totally bogus. He was as close to disenfranchised as the British Royal Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Medicine can do. Yet it continues to resonate in a certain kind of conspiratorial way.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think it resonates because you do a Google search on vaccines and autism and up comes all the websites. And you think there's something legitimate, even though it's all based on the single.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  One liar, one British liar.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  One deceptive set of bogus research, but.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Like an evil John Lennon of science.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  The bigger problem we have right now is here we were on the cusp of eradicating polio. And the CIA used a vaccine ruse in order to capture Osama bin Laden.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the polio vaccine, is that like smallpox vaccine? It was an attempt to rid it completely.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Completely rid it because there are no animals out there harboring polio. So it's possible if we can get rid of it in humans, that we can actually eradicate the virus.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Humans are the only carriers, therefore.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Of polio. No wolves with polio sort of walk in poorly about.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  So we've been really, you know, optimistic and the Rotary Clubs all over the world have raised the money to support this eradication effort. Well.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the Gates Foundation, is that they're in this too?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  They're in, they're in the game. The US government's in. ...the game, etc.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I'm gonna throw my hat in the game.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  You should. It's a great idea. Who wants paralyzed kids?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  I don't. But here's what happened. The CIA brought in a doctor by the name of Dr. Afridi in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and said, "We think that house has Osama bin Laden in it. We want you to do a phony baloney vaccine campaign so you can get in there, poke needles into these children's arms, and come back with DNA, and we can do the DNA analysis and find out if they're little bin Ladens. And if they are, then we know that's where he is, and we raid that house." So this Dr. Afridi staged a fake, it wasn't polio, it was a fake hepatitis vaccine campaign. He never did actually access the bin Laden kits. Nevertheless, the story has gone wild.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  And now Islamists, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda offshoots are slaughtering polio workers in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Yemen.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Because they think they're all part of a CIA conspiracy?

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's open season. And most of them are female volunteers, unpaid, that are being assassinated. We just had an incident where some Koreans were killed in their sleep in an African country where Islamists, this was in Nigeria, thought they were polio vaccinators. So we've hit this point where, as a matter of social conspiracy theory around protecting us from viruses, or your zombies, if you will, as a metaphor, you know, the CIA has actually mucked it up, and we now have Islamists all over the world convinced that in polio vaccines are something that's bad for Muslims. Okay.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that sounds, no, that's crazy. Yeah, well, so, again, science literacy matters here, because if you're aware of how biology works, how viruses work, how immunization works, and what it does, and why, then you'd be able to distinguish the bad efforts of the CIA from the good efforts of the World Health Organization or anybody else.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  By the way, we've been here before. This happened with HIV, over and over, until you had the head of state of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, convinced that HIV was harmless, and that there was a mass conspiracy to force Africans to go on phony drugs, all to make profits for these alleged American companies. And because he refused to make those drugs available to South Africans, 360,000 South Africans died of HIV without treatment.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the few moments we have left, what's the status of smallpox?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Completely gone. The only samples are stored in two locations.

• 24:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is one of them Amherst College?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  One is in Atlanta, Georgia. You can guess what that facility is, and the other is in Russia.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Center for Disease Control. Yeah, that's Putin, probably. Is this one of these things where they gotta come together and destroy them simultaneously?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yes, but they've never agreed to do it. So every time there's a meeting, should we destroy or not destroy, it turns into a brouhaha, a total mess, and everybody leaves the room and says, "Let's decide next time."

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should get Islamists to do it. So the day we manufacture viruses, then you can destroy that one, and anyone who wants to make it again later, they just follow some recipe and do it. Could we have a virus that hates ballpops?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  That's the next stage, which I'm now working on.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, the future viruses. StarTalk Radio, the zombie edition, the virus edition as well.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Joining me is co-host Eugene Mirman. Yes. Hello. Yes. Viruses! All about viruses. Somehow Eugene is very tickled by all of this. Laurie Garrett, your virus journalist extraordinaire, somehow being everywhere in the world where a virus outbreaks. And we've been analogizing this to zombies, because I have interview clips from Max Brooks. If you didn't know, he's actually the son of Mel Brooks, the famous actor.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  All becomes clear.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Writer, director. Writer, director, comedian, everything. Yeah. And I was in Comic-Con and caught up with him. Let's find out just what he says about zombies and viral outbreaks and cultural responses to it. Check it out.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it seems to me like the CDC should have you on their payroll.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Well, the CDC has a wonderful zombie plan and it's great because-

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I was joking. You're not joking now.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  No, I ain't joking.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has a zombie plan?

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Because for the first time in federal government history, they're actually connecting with young people. Because what they're trying to do is get little kids and teenagers thinking about disaster preparedness. But you don't say it in a real plague. You say, "Hey kids, if there's a zombie outbreak, here's what you need in your kit."

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's an education strategy?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's an education strategy. For the first time, you have young people talking about things like bottled water, radios, plans, first aid kits. God bless Dr. Khan over at the CDC. Let's cut his budget by another third.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Lori, I didn't know, did you know this about the CDC?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did know this about-

• 26:51Speaker 01

  I would, I would hope. And I'm pleased you do.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are people who, getting back to these fear factors, there are people who feel pretty sure that somewhere in some diabolical lab, somebody's cooking up a virus for evil nefarious purposes.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  They probably are, but that's not really what we should be afraid of.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Well, actually, let me put it to you this way. First of all, the Russians never shut down their entire biological warfare apparatus. And under Putin, the military continues to have something going on and they're not ever allowing any outside investigators to go in. So we don't know the total status of the Russian program.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  I do. It's probably terrifying.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and-

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A native Russian right here.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Putin with unlimited money is making biological weapons.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Tassadanya. Meanwhile, in the United States and to a lesser degree, other wealthy parts of the world, we have this very exciting revolution going on in biology called synthetic biology, where people are building organisms from the DNA up or RNA up.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She calls it an exciting, not terrifying, but exciting, okay?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  There are very positive things that can come from this, but-

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Is one of them enslaving the human race?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Well- One of the things is that groups are now saying, well, why can't we figure out what an epidemic would look like by making the very organisms that would create the worst-case epidemics and study them in the labs?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, like the end-of-the-world scenario beginning of every movie.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  The next stage is now you build the sequence, you send it to somebody's computer thousands of miles away theoretically, and they print it out in a 3D printer that's loaded with nucleotides. So now you can make microorganisms.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can fax an organism to somebody.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Essentially.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  That is an example of the deadliest organism to see what an outbreak... You're emailing deadly viruses to just see what happens.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not computer viruses, the instructions on how to make a virus that you just invented.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Right, so now, all of a sudden, we're no longer in the world where Biological Weapons Convention or any other initial agreement is about, or the FBI for that matter, is about monitoring who has test tubes with what in it, but rather who just emailed a sequence to somebody.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're never gonna be able to monitor that. How are you gonna monitor that?

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  So we're in a whole new world.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for messing with our day here. We were all happy before you started talking.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  So you could send to someone a thing that they would print and then it would just eat them. You could fax someone a wolf now. Just to give you a simple analogy, you could fax a wolf that would eat a person.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the person would say, gee, I wonder what this nucleotide sequence is, let me try it.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then out of the lab comes a monster.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Well, let's just say that we've already seen somebody, a group, make from the DNA up the polio virus. And we've seen some deliberate manipulation of viruses to give them the capacity to spread between mammals that they didn't have before.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Great, this all sounds great.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a new set of legs, some other kind of motorized...

• 29:51Speaker 01

  What's the biggest thing that someone's made, like a cat, a squirrel?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  No, nothing that big, but we don't want big. The problem is the very small, that which you cannot see.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so CDC is thinking about some of this. Any other agencies out there?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Well, WHO, FBI, CIA, National Security Council.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AARP.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  We're in the middle of all of this.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, wait a minute, but wait a minute.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  At the Council on Foreign Relations, we're working on this problem.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every agency has its own motivations. If the, if the military is doing this, it's not for the same reasons that the World Health Organization is doing it, I presume.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Actually, everybody's very worried about counterinsurgency.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get back to that. Me too. In our final segment, coming up, the special zombie edition of StarTalk Radio.

• 30:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Our final segment for StarTalk Radio, special zombie edition, where we're talking about zombies and viruses and all the stuff that can kill you in ways that you don't want. And I've got Laurie Garrett with Eugene Mirman, of course. But Laurie, you're, you're an expert in this. You're a journalist, Pulitzer Prize winning. You had a book come out last year, I Heard the Sirens Scream, how America responded to 9/11 and the anthrax threat. We probably did not respond well.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm betting that's not the first time we responded badly.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. The worst, the worst of all was our response to HIV.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  HIV.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Total disaster.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thirty years ago.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Thirty years ago, total disaster.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was the main problem?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  The main problem was that the victims, quote unquote, of the virus were gay men and Ivy drug users.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It became politicized.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  The president at the time was Ronald Reagan. He refused to even mention the epidemic.

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, now, depending on who you are as a demographic in a population, if you don't have a government that thinks about you in a caring, loving way, that could be your death song.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  The biggest lesson from tuberculosis, HIV, go down the list, is you don't want to be part of a disenfranchised group, or a group that the larger society looks down upon.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tea party.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Because if you are, if you are that individual, society will not be there for you.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tuberculosis, you're probably referring to the immigrant period back, you know, 110, 20 years ago.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Well, we now, we now have a XDR. Tuberculosis extremely drug resistant. Your chances of surviving if you get infected with it are extremely low. Well, guess what? It's spreading in Africa. It's spreading in prison populations in Russia.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disenfranchised.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Disenfranchised.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so this stuff affects all cultures, civilization, society. It's not just a simple outbreak containable where everybody might get it.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so my interview with Max Brooks, he kind of brings some of this to a closure. Whereas we talk about zombies as an analog to disease. Let's see what he's got to say.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  For me, it's about coming together, not splitting apart. And I think the problem is with a lot of zombie fans is they want a zombie outbreak to happen because they want to be the individual, the alpha male, society by themselves, no government.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The hero.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  They want to be the hero. And the problem is that hero has a life expectancy of 30. They don't realize how complicated society is. This, this civilization, this thing we've created, how many threads it takes to keep this tapestry together. You know, at a time when everyone is saying less government, I think anyone who says that should go spend a year in Somalia. See what it's like when there's really less government.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if the water shuts off, if the food is not delivered to your grocer.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know how to skin a deer? Do you know how to eat a squirrel? We don't have any of those towels.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  No, and every level builds on itself. I mean, how many of us are alive today because of medication or surgery or any of the modern wonders that keep so much of us alive? And if you pull that plug, a lot of us are doomed.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a subtext there is to perhaps get people to appreciate the very existence of the civilization in which they live?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  I would be very proud if people did that because I do think that most people nowadays, especially in this country, not only take civilization for granted, they're trying to unravel it. And I think that is really dangerous. I've traveled around the world and I've seen what happens when countries don't have this level of civilization.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know there's a new department of Homeland Security that's specifically charged with a disaster on the scale that takes out infrastructure? So an asteroid.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where transportation is halted, clean water is not available, medical supplies are not available. How do you recover from that?

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Right. Which I think is brilliant. I mean, I tell people in my, some of my zombie lectures, I say,

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My zombie lectures.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  I actually do, I do these lectures. I say, you know that we are now less likely to survive a quarantine than we were in 1917. Because in 1917, you go to your local food store, everything was either canned, or salted, or pickled. Now, everything in your grocery store is based on same-day, fresh delivery. What's gonna happen when those trucks don't roll in at 6 a.m.?

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You run out of food in four days.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, four days. As opposed to 1917, you might have a couple of weeks.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially the salting of food was very big, that, we did a whole show on salt.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in how that was so fundamental.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Right. And where does this all come from? How do you clean water? What happens when the water treatment shuts down? I mean, think about it today. What would happen today if Saudi Arabia got nuked by Iran, and we were not involved? What would happen to the price of fuel? What would happen to our society that runs on this single product?

• 35:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. Laurie, I wanna know, you, you, you think about this stuff, you write about it, is, what is the future of viruses? Where, where, where, where do we have to be, what do we have to be afraid of next?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Wherever climate change and habitat intrusion is occurring as a nexus, we see species put under tremendous pressure that carry viruses that humans have not been exposed to. Almost all of the big epidemics that we've seen in the last decade-plus have come from fruit bats that normally-

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bats? Did you say bats?

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Bats, B-A-T-S, that normally-

• 35:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are the big ones, the fruit bats.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Yes, they normally pollinate the rainforests. And as the rainforests are under stress, and the upper canopies are getting overheated, desperate bat populations are moving closer and closer into human areas and passing their viruses to our livestock, and eventually to us. And guess what that includes? SARS, Ebola turns out to be a bat virus, Marburg turns out to be-

• 36:22Speaker 01

  But also sexy vampires. You leave out the sexy vampires, like, it's not great.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Brad Pitt as a viral transmitter.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  A bat bit him and made him so handsome.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so, so basically-

• 36:35Speaker 02

  You're just jealous.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The environment is creating a whole other vectors for disease transmission.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and, and we're unable to really predict or quantify the risk.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna have to have you back on StarTalk, because this was fascinating, and my whole mind and body's in a new place, for having listened. Yeah, it's been two hours of StarTalk, and with Laurie on our last of those two hours. Thanks for joining us.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Eugene, thanks for- you're tweeting at Eugene Mirman. It's true. I got you there. This has been StarTalk Radio, based in part on a grant from the National Science Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off as usual by bidding you to keep looking up.