Shaun Newman Podcast - Ep. 74 - Professor of History - Paul Schue

Episode Date: April 29, 2020

Paul Schue is the Professor of History at Northland College.  He earned his PhD Modern European History  at the University of California, Irvine. We take a look back at how COVID-19 compares to earlier pandemics like the Spanish Flu & bubonic plague.  We discuss how fortunate we are to have modern science at our disposal compared to earlier civilizations who had to use the trial & error method among other things.  

This is Paul Shoe. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Hump, Hump, Hump, Hump day! Remember that commercial? The camel walking around the office. Hey, Janice, Janice, what day is it? Hump day? Hump day! Anyways, I'm in a good moon this morning. The sun's shining. It's a good day. It's a good day.

And if you need a laugh, go check out the Hump Day commercial with the camel, because, man, that is a great marketing right there. I mentioned last episode, the last dance, the documentary on the Chicago Bulls is currently playing on Netflix. Every Monday they release two new episodes. There's 10 episodes in total. They just released episodes three and four, so if you haven't checked it out, you've got four to catch up on. Fantastic. Fantastic look at a great team and the characters that go in there.

The last episode was on Rodman. And it just, unreal. So I suggest you get on, if you dabbled on the Tiger King, this is 10 times better, 100 times better. Maybe not as head scratching, but it's pretty freaking good. Now, I'll stop talking basketball. If you want to get to your business info on the podcast for free, just shoot me in a message, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, until this COVID-19 thing is over. I just want to help, want to get people,

if there's any way that, you know, getting your message out on here and grabbing the attention of a couple listeners, so let me know. All right. Before we run through it, I've got to remind you, YouTube is here,

so you can check out episodes now on YouTube, and there is video for it now. And Kent Stanoforth, I got to give him another shut out. He gave me a sign, Border King's, Jersey from Hockey Day in Saskatchewan, get all the Allen Cup winners that were in attendance to sign of Border King's jersey. You got framed up by Art and Soul here in town who do amazing work. And, man, I can't wait to hang it up on the plug on the studio wall. Like, it is just a gem.

So thanks, Kent Stanforth. Really, really appreciate it. Now, the Lloyd Minster Regional Health Foundation would like to thank our local health care team who responded so quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our local hospital leaders move fast to secure life-saving supplies for our frontline staff, and within days our hospital had a strong stock of life-saving supplies from the local community. And that happened because of you, the donors, our donors. Thanks to the strong support from all of our donors over the many years, our frontline workers are empowered to care for all of us through the Lloyd Minster Region Health Foundation.

If you're looking for ways to help, a COVID-19 emergency fund has been started. While there is no pressure to give in these uncertain times, we are taking donations to cover a variety of items that have already been purchased or still need to be purchased. PPE, iPads for isolated residents and patients, care packages for staff, opti-flow machines, food, coffee, and meals for staff, room monitors, mobile, carts, and shelves for added hospital units. The Health Foundation encourages those looking to donate to call us at 306-82061 or online at L-R-H-F-D-Ca backslash donate. The Health Foundation is also accepting cards and letters of support and encouragement for health care staff and isolated residents and patients. These can be mailed to our office for more information visit. Once again, their website, LRHF.C.A. Now, Kenny Rutherford, Rutherford Appraisal Group, houses the podcast.

He says, in these difficult times in your need, if you're in need of any appraisal work from bank loans, setting a fair purchase price, whether you're buying or selling any type of real estate, shop, homes, farms, cabins, restaurants, you name it. Give Kenny and Rutherford Appraisal Group a call. 306, 307, 1732, you won't find anyone better than old Kenny Rutherford. Chris Weeb, Keep a Concrete. Open for business specializing in commercial, agricultural, and residential, basement floors, driveways, sidewalks, patios, garage pads, shops, barns, countertops. Essentially, if you can dream it, they can do it.

Give the boys a call 780-871-1083. Carly, Mr. Kloss and himself, Windsor Plywood. They're open regular hours. He said, call ahead if they want to help with the physical distancing. And I know here, hopefully, over the next. a couple months, things are going to maybe go back to whatever the new normal is going to be. I hate the new normal. But that's what it's going to be.

And hopefully this physical distancing, you know, hopefully we get to be around people again. But right now, if you're looking to do a little side project, Carly Closs and the team over Windsor Plywood, we've got a curbside pickup or free in-town delivery while this current situation is going on. I'm heading over to see Carly actually today. I got a little project I want to do, so I'm going to go pick his brain. And once again, Windsor Plywood. The boys over there are fantastic. Call and ring at, CR Sales and Marketing.

He's hoping everyone is staying healthy and safe if you're looking for a unique and cost-effective approach to sales and marketing within the oil and gas industry. Give calling a call 780871 1417. Corey Dubick, Midwest Flooring. They're open regular hours, folks. He says, call, stop in or shop online. Lori LaBerge, Abbey Road, Flowers and Gifts, Temperance. very close to walkins but are doing curbside pickup and free in-town delivery and i just got a great reminder that yesterday that mother's day is around the corner i'm saying this loud folks

all you men out there mother's day is coming nothing better than some flowers so give them a call they're open 10 a m to 2 p.m. 780 875 2211 don't say i didn't warn you mother's day around the corner here wandering wild they've teamed up with let's watson walk the talk and you can get some of their let's walk the talk merchandise now through wander and wild uh you go on their uh their site you buy it a little bit of the money goes back to help uh let's walk the talk uh foundation where paula burge is walking from saskatoon to lloyd again this year i believe in august and he does it over a six day period raising money for mental health awareness grid athletics check them out on instagram or facebook they still

have a great deal going on where if you spend $100, you get $25 back in a local business gift cards. You get to choose where you want it. Factory Sports, give the boys a call. I just saw Kent Stanforth that I actually bought a bike or a couple of bikes off of them. And they look like pretty sharp units. If you go on their Instagram page, Factory Sports Bikes, you can see everything they got. Or, I mean, ball season, fingers crossed, is right around the corner. might be time to go pick up a new club or a glove, what have you.

So head over or give him a call. 306-825-7678. Here is your factory sports tale of the tape. He earned his bachelor's with a major in history, minor in mathematics at McAllister College, his master's in modern European history at Pennsylvania State University, and his Ph.D. Modern European History, a University of California, Irvine.

His work has appeared in academic journals such as French historical studies, the intellectual history review, patterns of prejudice, the history teacher, and national identities. I am talking no other than Paul Schu, Professor of History at Northland College. He was there when I graduated. He was my academic mentor, as I like to call him. and he is a fantastic talk. He's just a very, very, very knowledgeable guy. And I think you guys are going to enjoy this one. So without further ado.

So welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Paul Shoe, Professor of History, at Northland College in Asheville, Wisconsin, where I attended. Paul got his Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of California. Irvine, really appreciate you joining me. As I was just telling you, I'm pretty excited. You were my professor of history. I've got a degree in history when I was at North London.

I joke, but if you had online classes, I might take one for the rest of life. Really enjoy listening to you talk. You're very knowledgeable person on lots of different subjects, henceforth, me bringing you on to talk a little bit about the history of flus and pandemics and everything else. So thanks again, Paul, for joining me. Thanks. That's a pleasure to be here. So first off, how is Ashland going through? all this. I mean, school would have got cut a little bit short. Yeah, we stopped classes like the

middle of March and they sent everybody home. They had about 40 students stayed on campus because they didn't, they were international students or for whatever reason couldn't go home. But all the rest of them went home and we've been doing online classes. We just finished up last Friday. And then we're starting a May term on Monday. And that's a really reduced schedule. It's all online. And they basically, most of the Mayterm classes got canceled because they tend to be experiential courses. You go out in the field for ornithology or something, and you just can't do that.

And you can't do anything in person. So, but we added a big course called the history, or not the history, but just pandemics. And it's like 12 different professors all offering, you know, sociological perspectives on pandemics and biological, et cetera. So that's our one big course for May, but I'm actually teaching my regular French Revolution. Well, French Revolution was pretty good, too. Well, normally when I have a guest on, we do a little bit of backstory on them because usually I'm talking about a person's journey to where they currently are. Maybe just briefly, where all have you traveled in your academic studies to get to Northland? Well, I went to McAllister College.

I went there because my dad taught there. I'm sorry, I can go there for free. That's a nice bonus. It was, it was a nice bonus. But, and I actually remember, I went in there. My dad was a math professor, so I went in there. My whole family's math people. My sister was a computer program.

My brother's an engineer. And I went in there. I was going to do math and computer science. And I plowed through math and computer science courses the first two years and took a bunch of other stuff. And then my junior year, I was looking at what I had to do to finish the math major. And I said, huh, I've only got two more math courses and then I'll never have to do math again. You know, wait a second.

Why am I doing that? If I never want to do math again, I should not major in it. So I started looking around for things that I wanted to study. And I really liked history classes. So at Christmas of my junior year, I decided I'd go to both the department's Christmas parties. So I went to the math department at Christmas party. It was this huge table of homemade food, you know, brownies and cakes and all this stuff.

And then a bowl of non-acolic punch at the end. And everyone was standing around with little plates of food chatting. And I ate some food there. And I went over to History Department. And there was a, I walked in and there was a big room and there was a boom box playing. There were people dancing on the tables. There was one empty bowl of chips and there are beer cans everywhere.

I was like, hmm, I think I want to be a historian. You see you got lured in by beer and chips. Yeah. So I became a historian. I'm a major in history there. Went to Penn State for a master's degree. Got there. Actually, I really wanted to study Renaissance history,

but I got there and the guy who did Renaissance history just didn't click with me, I just didn't like him. So I looked around and I wound up going to University of California, Irvine. And while I was there, I did French history, 20th century French history. I did mostly on my dissertation on French fascists, although some un-communists.

And I had to go to France for, I went to France for about five and a half months to do research and travel all around Europe when I did that. And then I came back, graduated, and I taught for two years at Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach, and then I got the job of Northland,

so I've been here ever since. Got to Northland in 2001. It's a 19 years in Northland, though. I've been there 19 years now. In fact, I got there, and they gave me a list of courses that the previous guy had taught, and they said, if you want to teach them if you don't, don't. And I looked down the list, and one of them was Middle East history, and I thought, there's no way I'm teaching that.

I mean, I had some background in from graduate school, but I really just didn't, it wasn't my field. I wasn't that interested in it. And then, you know, two weeks later, 9-11 happened. And I'm like, oh, hell, I've got to teach Middle East history. I've been teaching Middle East history for 19 years ever since then. Which was also a good course. No, you took both of them?

Yeah, I did. I think I took everything you offered at college, to be honest. It's a good approach, I think. But, yeah, so I've been teaching Middle East history. That one is all surprising to me because I got to rewrite the last two, three lectures every single time because something happens since the last time I thought the course, you know. something happened to the Palestinians, something happened with Iran,

something happens with Saudi Arabia, something happens with Syria, you know, it's just one thing after another. It's one thing after another, and it's constantly evolving, and it's been going on now for how many years? Yeah, I mean,

really the mess in the Middle East is really since World War I, the British and French really screwed it up, right up for World War I. But yeah, so that's a good hundred years of mess. for people who are in history buffs. What did they do to screw it up, Paul? Well, basically up until World War I,

you had the Ottoman Empire ruled most of the Middle East, at least the Arabic-speaking portion of the Middle East. And it was pretty stable. The Europeans were trying to get in there to trade and for colonization stuff. They weren't having too much luck until World War I and that destroyed the Ottoman Empire. And then Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them.

They created a bunch of, countries like Jordan, Syria, Iraq. And they pretty much set and train a whole set of political dynamics that have been a mess ever since. They also, the British took over Palestine and that set in motion of process that led the creation of Israel and all that. So they probably shouldn't have been in there, but they were. Yeah, well, I just think, I mean, there's a lot of different cultures in that small little area. But if you were to come into the U.S., for instance, and just start, have a different country come in,

take a pen, and just start drawing lines and say, you're part of this country now. You probably have some heated anger for a lot of years. Yeah, and, you know, the British had this habit. They like to draw boundaries around colonies so that they would have multiple ethnic groups that they could sort of have tension between the ethnic groups. So everyone would be angry at each other and not at the British. And then they often like to pick a small ethnic group and sort of put them in power

because they knew that if they're small enough, they knew they'd only stay in power if the British were behind them. So they'd like so to be loyal to the British. So they did some, they created Iraq basically from three different provinces that had three different ethnic groups, the Shia Arabs, the Sunni Arabs and the Sunni Kurds. And they stuck them all together in one country, and then they put the Sunni Arabs in charge. And, you know, it's just been a mess ever since that's set up the civil war that broke out in Iraq when we invaded in 2003. Because, you know, so the British did turn purpose.

A hundred years of misery almost. Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, and it's really been, yeah, a bunch of strife since, you know, 1920. I guess that is 100 years, well. Yeah. Well, the reason I wanted to talk to you, because I know any which way I point the arrow, you're going to go with it, is, you know, when this coronavirus started to, well, what has it been?

A little over a month? And, you know, and then things just start, and I mean, a little over a month, I guess I should say, for North America. And when things started shutting down, people started to panic a little bit. it and I just started thinking, I'm like, I don't know, like, there's been other flus come through or pandemics. Obviously, we've gone through, our previous generations have gone through. And so I guess I was just kind of curious what the similarities from a government infrastructure people standpoint is from, well, and you'd list it off before we started going about five or six different

one. So just kind of the similarities or maybe the comparisons between some of the things that have come before us. Yeah. Well, this, I mean, it might not feel like it, but we're actually pretty well positioned if you look at how, you know, as a world, we're handling the coronavirus. It's, we really have a whole lot more in a toolbox and people did in the past because, I mean, it's only in the last 150 years that we've had germ theory of disease, which is a huge, out how to handle something like this. So anything before 150 years ago, people had no idea what caused disease. They had no sense whatsoever.

And they really didn't know how to handle it. And so often their responses were much made things worse even. What kind of responses would they have? Well, like if you look at the Black Death, which, you know, it just is a bit of history. The Black Death swept across, it started probably in Southwestern. China. It swept along trade routes in Central Asia and then got to the Middle East in 1346, 47. It hit Italy in 1347 and then through 1348 to 1350, it swept across Europe. And it was, it was nasty. It would hit an area and, you know, there'd be a couple of months

of an outbreak in an area and it would kill between 33 and 50% of the population. So we're talking absolutely massive death rates, but people had no idea why this happened, right? And, you know, people had all sorts of ideas. The University of Paris published something saying that they thought it was a bad alignment of Saturn and Venus and Jupiter or something in 1346 that had caused this disease. But sometimes they thought it was a Jewish plot. And so there were lots of pogroms that attacked Jewish communities. communities because they thought they were poisoning wells or something to cause the disease. Some people thought it was God's wrath that the society had gone off the wrong track and God was punishing them.

So you saw people calling on a return to religious morals, et cetera, and you even saw this group called the flageolence that would have big parades where they would walk through the streets whipping themselves from the back with with leather lashes to cause their backs to bleats. et cetera to show that they were sorry to God and hope that he would forgive them and take the way the plague. And then at one point they thought that cats were part of the problem. They thought it was witchcraft and cats were associated with witchcraft. So they killed all the cats, which might have been a bad idea because one theory of what the black death was was that it was transmitted by fleas that were on rats. And so when the cats died, the rats population exploded, which might to spread the disease more. We don't know. But really they had no idea what caused it. So they were, they were just trying anything. And people had amulets and they had potions and they, you know,

were poisoning themselves with all sorts of stuff to try to prevent the disease. That's with, uh, with the unknown, like something like that. Even today, you see all the conspiracy theorists, well, theories going wild right now. Oh, yeah, it's 5G cell phone towers, you know. Well, it's 5G, it's the government, it's the Democrats, it's, there's China. It's China, right? Yeah, somebody's a theory that it was a released biological weapon that got out of a Chinese lab. Yeah, there's all sorts of theories, which in some sense tells you just how much human beings are the same as they were, you know, 2,000 years ago or 1,500 years ago.

well that that actually doesn't well i mean it surprises me but it kind of doesn't surprise me out the same time because all that's really been like we've come light years in technology and how we live and you talk about uh how the disease spread back then with rats on or flees on rats on ships and things like things have changed from that standpoint but humans are almost kind of simple beings they are they are and it's it's and and you know what's funny and this is interesting because it really I'm kind of fascinated by what's going to happen with this because you know the coronavirus right now has really sort of tanked the global economy certainly tanked the American economy and the question is you know will this bring about any big structural changes coming after that but

after the black death there was there was a serious period of 30 or 40 years of so and economic realignment. A lot of historians said it really, the black death just killed feudalism because so many peasants died off that the aristocrats who had counted on tying peasants down to the land and making them produce wealth, suddenly they didn't have enough peasants and they started competing with each other for peasants and offering better deals and whatever. And they had to sort of negotiate feudalism out of the picture because peasants didn't want it anymore.

And peasants were valuable. But it also led to a bunch of laws that tried to lock down wages for things because that the sort of bidding for workers led to inflation, and they had no idea what inflation was or why it would be happening. They thought it was some sort of sinful thing of people being greedy. And so they tried to lock down prices, and that led to two massive peasant revolts in one in France, the Jacaree in 1358, and the English Peasants Rebellion in 1381. Both cases where they were really angry at these restrictions that were slapped on to try to control peasants after the black death because the peasants had a better hand than the economy.

And they were asking for more and getting better wages and things and the pushback set off the revolts. So I'm, you know, obviously I'm not predicting a peasant revolt, but it would be interesting to see if this will, you know, if this huge change in the economy will shift the dynamics, you know, will it, you know, because a lot of people are asking some big questions. now about, you know, capitalism or whatever, or gig economy or things like that. And I'm wondering if it's going to cause any structural changes there. What's a gig economy? The idea that over the last 30 or 40 years, lots of corporations have gone from instead

of hiring someone as an employee, because that includes all sorts of, you often have to health benefits and it often has OSHA requirements and there are all sorts of things to protect them. You instead hire them as an independent contractor. So you're hiring them for a particular thing, a gig. And so an increasing percentages of certainly in the United States of the workforce are gig workers who are hired as independent contractors by a corporation. And then there's a bunch of ways it can happen.

You might have a workforce corporation that finds workers and then, you know, signs contracts to provide workers to another company. or you might just have people who sign up as independent contractors to write articles for a website or to do something like that. And so a lot of these gig workers are really getting slammed right now because their work has dried up because of the coronavirus lockdowns, but they're not eligible for unemployment insurance because they didn't have an employer. They were self-contractors. So there's a lot of anger and a lot of people are realizing this is really a mess. And so I don't know if it's going to bring about structural changes or not,

but I think there's going to be a lot of angry people who are looking at that in the next few years. Well, you're going through with school being forced to close and now using technology to get them. Do you see a change coming there? Yeah, well, I do think you will see. I think a lot of corporations are realizing that a lot of jobs that they thought had to be in an office could actually be done from home. And some corporations might realize that's to their advantage. They don't have to have offices as much. It costs them money and things.

Some of it might be to workers' advantage. But I think that might bring about an acceleration of the process of technology change in the way we work. Because people are suddenly under the force to the coronavirus lockdown. We're suddenly realizing just how much we really could have been doing this differently. Because all of a sudden we could do it differently. Maybe we always could have. So it's an interesting question as to whether, you know, more people will work from home in the future. More people will, you know, come, go to work on Zoom or go to the meeting or whatever.

Well, you bring up a interesting topic because I've been wondering if the world goes back to the way it was from a month ago. And whatever timeline is. Is it a month? Is it six months? whatever it is. And you've already said that in one plague or pandemic major changes happened. What was it like after the Spanish flu? That's fun. It's an interesting thing because actually, you know, a lot of people remember the Spanish flu recently, but before that it was really forgotten. And in fact, I was just reading

a book a little while ago, it was called America's Forgotten Pandemic. It was just about the Spanish in America, not the rest of the world, but it really has not registered, it didn't bring about massive changes. And part of the reason for that was because the Spanish flu came right on the heels of the World War I. And people were literally just paying attention to World War I. They knew the Spanish flu was happening, but it just didn't seem as important as World War I. So when the history books got written and when, you know, the cultural impact was muted because World War I was so huge. But so the Spanish flu was, I mean, it's huge.

You know, at the minimum, it killed 20 million people in a couple of years. It probably killed 50 million. We don't have good numbers. And so... Why don't they have good numbers? Because, I mean, every day now in our culture, you probably see it too. They give you, like, new numbers from every stinking place. Oh, yeah.

What it is, blah, blah, blah, blah. Although there's a lot of evidence that with coronavirus, those, those numbers are not accurate because so many people are asymptomatic that there's, there are lots of people who have coronavirus who don't even know it and aren't showing up on the numbers. So we really don't have good numbers on that. The, uh, I just saw some, some study that came out yesterday that showed that by the time they had the, the first several deaths in the United States, they thought maybe 10,000 people were already infected, um, because it had spread so,

spread so rapidly. That's a model. They don't know. So, I mean, we don't have good numbers now, but in 1918 to 1920, which is when the Spanish flu was, they had pretty good numbers for places like, you know, for places in the developed world,

Europe and the United States, but there were a number of places where we really were kind of high-ed in the numbers. For instance, World War I was happening, and both sides, the Germans and the French and British and Americans in Europe, didn't want the numbers out because they didn't want the other side to know how many of their soldiers were sick. And it swept through the trenches and, you know, swept through the, in particular, the training areas and the,

and the staging areas behind the lines is where most of the Spanish flu was going. And for instance, the American troops on the ships going across from the U.S. to Europe in 1918 to support the war effort there, several hundred thousand American troops were sent over there and they were losing hundreds of soldiers on every ship. I mean, they had fantastic death rates. They had some of those ships, 50% of the soldiers got sick, you know, 5,000 cases, you know. And it was just an absolute nightmare because when you're on a ship,

you can't send people to the next hospital over or anything. You got them all right there. And so that was an absolute nightmare, but the Americans didn't want this to get out. They didn't want German to know this. And so a lot of times, even officers at like of their, you know, you know, division or brigade or whatever would not want the numbers to get out because it'd be, you know, and so there's a lot of ways in which the military numbers are probably not quite accurate, although the military did try to keep good numbers, but they also were trying to hide the numbers. And so everything was a little sketchy there. But it also, I mean, places like India had huge numbers. deaths from Spanish flu and we just don't know how many because they didn't have good census numbers

and they just didn't have the track so so they simply didn't have the government infrastructure to keep track so well with a world war going on it's not like they can you know it's almost unbelievable how quickly we shut everything down like it yeah it is it is shut down um stay-at-home orders where you're not allowed to you know leave your houses different states have done that I don't know how many of the states have done that but um here in in lloyd like uh basically you know within a two week period nobody was really doing anything all businesses have been told to close and so everybody's just been hanging out at home and you think back to a world war going on even if they're losing guys over on the boats going over they get really got no choice but the same guys the war ain't going to take a halt

for a few years exactly and and and you know know, everybody knew that. And there were a lot of efforts to sort of say, you know, this, you know, this is just part of the sacrifice of being a soldier or something like that. You know, you're going into war where you're risking your life. Well, this is another part of it. So they really tried to minimize the danger, although the army was terrified of how many soldiers they were losing. And another thing about the Spanish flu, which was really interesting, is that it, you know, most epidemics, flu epidemics or something like that, if you look at the, the fatality rate on a graph, you know, where you put the number of the,

you put the age groups along the x-axis at the bottom, and then you put the death rate along the y-axis. It looks sort of like a U because a lot of very young children die of the flu. And then when you get up, and by the time you get to teenage years, very few people die of it, and then it stays low until you get up to, you know, 50s or 60s, and then it starts to climb again. And then when you get to 70s and 80s, lots of people, die from it. And so it's an invert, or it's a you, basically. But if you look at the graph or the

Spanish flu, it actually was a W that lots of infants died of it. And then the death rate dropped until teenagers. But then 20 to 40 year olds were actually a huge number of the people who died. It was actually 60% of the deaths were 20 to 40 year olds. And then the numbers went down from 50 to 70. Fewer people died age 50 to 70 from this. and then it went up again for the really old in the 80s and 90s. So it really hit people in the prime of their lives, 20s and 30s, harder than any other group, which is something nobody had seen before from the flu. And it was really just a strange thing,

but that meant that, of course, a war zone is the worst possible place for an epidemic because everybody's 20 to 40 in a war zone, you know. So why would it be, would some of the conditions, living conditions, the stress, the everything going on about the war, would that be a big factor in that number? Or was it something else? Well, the death rate is, they think the death rate was that had to do with the fact that if you had a strong immune system, you had a stronger immune response for whatever reason to this. And it was actually your immune system killing you.

So the people who had the prime of life immune system were the ones who were dying from it. But of course, a war zone is a perfect place for transmitting the flu because lots of soldiers, I mean, they're all in barracks. They're all right next to each other, right? And it's an airborne virus. And then you have a lot of people who are sleep deprived, which lowers their immune response. And then, you know, you have things like bad food,

wet conditions in the trenches, things like that. And especially on transport ships. I mean, you know, that air in those places must just have been filled with the food. Yeah. And so, yeah, it was a, you know, It was a perfect storm of having a whole bunch of, first of all, that it was a disease that killed people 20 to 40, but also that you had a social situation in the war that stuck a whole bunch of people in that exact age group together in perfect conditions for spreading disease. So it was really a really bad situation. Do you think with Trump in there and him pushing to get the economy going, is that going to happen?

Or you sitting on the backside of this going like, we got a little ways to go yet? Well, I think that, I mean, I don't know if you heard, the governor, Georgia just announced he's open in the state up again on Monday. Oh, I did not hear that. And Trump actually pushed back on that. So, no, no, no, it's too soon because it is too soon. But it's kind of interesting because here again, the Spanish flu offers this an interesting comparison because the Spanish flu actually had. three waves. It depends on where you were looking. Some of them only had two waves and someplace only had one wave. But basically in the spring of 1918, there was a flu wave, especially an epidemic

in Boston and in parts of Europe. And it was not too viral, not too many people died. Lots of people got sick, but not too many people died. And they think that was the Spanish flu, but they think it then mutated because it came back in September, October, actually starting in August. depending on which region you're looking at. But September, October, and then in November, it really hit hard. And there was a huge death rate there. That was the biggest bulge.

And then there was another wave in January, February, March of 2019. And then there were some minor waves until 2020. So it really had these different waves where it came back much harder. And actually, the one of the one of the, of the kind of cool stories about this is that this sounds so much like what we're getting right now. I don't know if you've heard about these protests in the United States, the people protesting. They want to open up the economy right now.

We got protests in Canada, too. In San Francisco, there was the public health official in San Francisco, Dr. Hassler had imposed masks. Everyone to wear masks. And the police were actually giving people fines for not wearing masks. and there were all this, you know, requirements to wear masks and social distancing, et cetera. And San Francisco did pretty well, but then they had a big wave in October, and then September or November, basically October, and everyone was fine with it.

And then they started to be protesting against the masks. And it started to actually get nasty. People were, you know, start off as just op-eds and newspaper. We got to get rid of the mask. You know, the death rates falling, whatever. But it got pretty nasty. Dr. Hassler actually got a bomb in the mail from somebody who wanted the masks, the mask order removed. And there's actually a group called the Anti-Mask League form to try to agitate to get the mask rules removed. And they did. And then there was another wave in December and January.

And so the sort of anti-mask league thing died out because, you know, as soon as they got their way, then there was another. wave of the epidemic. So what you're saying is, is back in the Spanish flu, they had mass. Yeah. They fought mass and then used mass again anyways. Yeah. Isn't it interesting to you? Like, do you just sit there knowing this when they're talking about mass?

No, we don't need mass. And then you just go like, like, it's only a matter of time. They're going to be like, guys, we need to put mass on. Yeah. And I mean, it is kind of funny because there's so many times that as a historian, you just, you know, you're always looking and going, yeah, we did this before. This isn't going to work well, you know. But this is one case, of course.

Why is it then, Paul, that we don't look back on history a little bit more often and go, here's some lessons to be learned here? I think there's a couple of reasons. I think one is that, I mean, first of all, history is often hard for people. I don't think we teach history very well. So a lot of people, just their exposure to histories, it's just a whole bunch of facts. and names and dates that nobody doesn't mean anything. You have to teach history sort of as a narrative because that's how people process it.

And we don't do that very often. But so a lot of people just think history is a pain of the butt that they had to sit there in high school and was deadly boring. So I think that's that's actually one big reason we don't listen to history more. But another is that, you know, there's a, um, history doesn't exactly repeat itself. repeat itself, although in cases like this, you know, with the epidemics, it sounds pretty close, but but it often doesn't quite repeat itself, you know, you've heard the, you've heard the phrase history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, which which sort of captures that. And, you know, Carl Mark said history, everything in history happens twice, the first times a tragedy, the second time's a farce. But I think that we have a hard time with analogies, you know, because you can, you know, because you can, You can point to all sorts of different epidemics and say,

how do we handle this epidemic? And it's not clear which one's the best comparison or what you should take from each one, you know, because history isn't quite an obvious, like we've had this exact situation before. It's more just we had five things that were sort of similar to this, which one's the right one? So people often don't get the right lessons from history. They don't take the right things from it.

But wouldn't, once we're through this, to sit here and go, chances are we're never going to have anything remotely like a pandemic happen ever again would be probably the most absurd thing to ever say, yes? Oh, yes. That would absolutely be absurd because, I mean, we've, we have created in the modern world an absolutely perfect system for spreading pandemics because we have so much airline travel and it's so fast that people can get sick on one continent and be on another continent for coughing for two days before, you know, they get really sick. And so we've created, and we're so interconnected. We can't stop global trade, you know, because we're all so interconnected now

that we've created, and we have these big cities with, you know, public transit and people packed together there. We've created all these big institutions like universities and colleges and schools where we've put people together on a regular basis. We've created a perfect situation for epidemics to happen. I was thinking one more too, sports. I was looking up, I didn't, I actually didn't know. Like the NHL, the MLB football, well, not football, soccer, if they closed down during the Spanish flow.

And it turns out the NHL specifically was going into game six and they called it four or six, or five hours before the game between Montreal and Seattle. And one of the guys ended up dying and they had like five or six guys off the team get sick and whatever else. Right. So, I mean, another thing that has come light years from 100 years ago is how big the sporting events are. And how people follow, you know, you're talking about interconnectedness. Like there's people who travel all over the place to go watch different sporting events. It's become a huge, huge thing now.

Yeah, and then you have the pre and post event, you know, parties and bars hopping. Well, that's usually the only reason you go, isn't it? Well, there's also the barbecueing and the parking. But also, you know, rock concerts. We have all sorts of things where we put people together in huge numbers, you know. You think of some of these music festivals like Coachella or Burning Man or whatever. Yeah. Oh, even go comics, Comic-Con.

Oh, yeah. Right? Like that's a giant thing now. And although I think those costumes might provide some, you know, masking aspect. Fair, fair, fair. But, yeah, it's an interesting question about, you know, we have to learn from the past because we know pandemics are coming. We have to look at everything we've got to see what works.

And we actually do have a pretty good sense of what works. I mean, you look at what South Carolina. Korea's done or or even Germany and they're they're doing a really good job on this. I mean, South Korea had their first cases about the same time the U.S. did and they've done massive testing and that they never shut down the economy completely. And they've, and they're basically reopened it and their death rate is, you know, orders of magnitude less than the United States per capita, I mean, you know, per million people or per thousand people, whatever number you want to count by, they're way lower than we are as like, and I don't have the numbers off the top of my head,

but their number of deaths was, you know, a couple thousand and, you know, we're at 46,000 now. And now their population is smaller, but even if you adjust the population, we're way higher than you. What do you think is sweet? What do you think is sweet and not shutting things down? Well, I haven't looked in on them lately. I read some stuff a couple weeks ago. They were not shutting down. But then I saw they started to really have a spike, and they were talking about shutting it down.

I haven't heard. What have they done since? Actually, I don't know what they've done since. I know they've had from March 25th to April 7th, which, I mean, now we're at April 20, 23rd. So that's two weeks ago then. They'd spiked from their first 50 deaths hit at March 25th. and by what was that not even two weeks later they were at 500 and some deaths so they'd gone up

quite considerably in that amount of time yeah so i i think i mean they were talking the last time i'd heard i think it was about two weeks ago that they were talking about going to lockdown and massive testing and whatever um and and sort of following the iceland model because iceland handle it it pretty well. So it would be interesting to see if they change tack and go on a different direction. But yeah, and you know, I hate to say it, but I think the United States is turning out to be a case study and how not to handle an epidemic. Because if you look at the, I mean, we have a third of all the deaths in the world now. And we're not a third of the world's population by any means. And the numbers are only going up. And if we start opening up states

again, you know, ending the lockdown, we're just going to have more. We don't have any testing going. We have no idea how much. And we have some testing, but not nearly as much as we have need to know what's going to happen. So in your mind knowing about all the different pandemics that have come previously, like is this, you know, in little small town, Canada, we've kind of of watching, I'm thankful it isn't everywhere around us, right? I would not want to be in New York City right now. But we kind of watch and go like, is it really that bad out there? Because at times, you know, there just isn't a whole lot going on in town. Or in Canada in general, right? Compared to what's happening in the United States and other places, here it's, it's pretty calm

for the most part. There has been people affected by it. And I, assume as time goes on there will be more people affected by it. Yeah. Well, there's an interesting shift going on right now that, you know, initially in the United States, it really hit Seattle, New York City, big cities like that. And so people sort of assume that's where it was going to stay. But in the last couple weeks, the number of cases in the suburbs and then out in rural areas in the United States has started to blossom. And that's, that might get ugly fast because most rural because the U.S. healthcare system, which was kind of a mess before this anyway,

most rural communities are kind of underserved in terms of hospital beds available and doctors, et and so if it hits hard in rural areas anywhere close to those sort of numbers per capita that you see in New York City or something, rural hospitals are just going to be overwhelmed. There's going to be 10 times as many patients that need beds as there are beds. And, you know, ventilators are out of the question and that sort of thing. It's going to be, it'll be interesting to see because I think part of the reason that the president of the United States has been less than sort of aggressive on this is because I think in some level he felt that his base is not in these big cities. And so it wasn't worrying his base. But now it's starting to get out into where his base is, which is the suburbs and rural communities.

And it'll be interesting to see if he changes his tune in a hurry. I'm not sure what his response is going to be but I think a lot of Republicans who had been sort of downplaying before that this are going to start saying oh my gosh this is a real serious issue because it's their constituents

and their voters now well you bring up a place I wanted to go I wanted to go to it looks like it's been mainly in where people congregate which means big cities are the quickest to be affected by it and whether

or not that is going to translate over to smaller communities. But on a side note, I just wanted to say that Sweden is up to 16,000 cases over 2,000 deaths as of today. And that's what they're reporting. So that's a sizable jump from, I mean, not compared to some of the bad countries out there that have really been hit. But that is jumping compared to other countries. Yeah. But. Yeah, I'm going to guess they're going to have to start following suit with, you know, the South Korea model.

or Iceland or whatever. As far as where it's been outbreaking, is that something that happened in the past, I assume, as well, right? The trade routes would have been the port cities would have come through there first and then slowly trickled out, or did it stay in certain spots?

I mean, if you look at something like the Black Death, which has really been tracked pretty well, it started in Southwest China, and it absolutely followed the trade routes. Right across, you know, Central Asia, the, you know, the traders through Samarkand and Bukhara and et cetera into Persia. And then it, we know it got to Europe because in, at the end of 1347, there was a, the city of Venice, or I'm sorry, Genoa, controlled a town called Kaffa on the north shore of the Black Sea. and the Mongols attacked Kaffa. And there was a siege, and the Mongols had,

the plague broke out in the Mongol army. And so the Mongols started to take the dead bodies of plague victims and launch them over the walls into Kaffa to try to give them the plague. And it apparently worked because a bunch of Italians then left Kaffa and they went to Genoa and they brought it in December of 1347 to Genoa.

And then it just spread. And you could just see this, the concentric circles on a map are just they're just perfect and how you know month by month it just kept raiding out from genoa Italy to marching and they actually have it down to like you know 30 miles a week it marched and and it hit almost everywhere in Europe I mean by 1350 it was hitting Sweden and Finland and Russia and you know a long way from from Italy but there were a couple of places that weren't hit for whatever reason the Czech Republic, it wasn't the Republic then, but Bohemia is what it was called, really didn't get hit ever. It's like everyone around

and got the plague and they didn't. And nobody has an explanation for why and it just that's the way it happens. Nobody can figure out why they didn't get it. Yeah, nobody knows. Because I mean, we just don't, you know, 1348 was a long time ago. And we just don't have, you know, The sorts of things we would look for would be like genetic markers in the population or something, you know, that there's some special genetic variation or mutation that made them immune or something, or maybe they, but we just don't, we can't do that now. Although there has been, there's been a lot of really interesting stuff done on trying to figure out what exactly the black death was genetically. because for a long time it was a stooped, it was bubonic plague. And bubonic plague is a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. And it can, it can, there's actually three diseases you can get from it.

One is bubonic plague, which is where you get, you get bitten by a flea that has the plague virus in its, or bacterium in its gut. And the, it's a weird little process. The, the bacterium, like, blocks the flea's, throat. So the flea gets really hungry because no food can get into its stomach, but it can't actually eat. And so what happens is the flea keeps biting you and sucking blood in, but then it regurgitates it back into the person because it can't get into its stomach. And so it's pumping the bacterium into the victim. And so if you get it that way, it tends to infect your immune system,

your lymph nodes, and they swell up really big. They turn like grapefruit size and turn black. And there's a called bubos, which is where you get bubonic plague. And So it attacks the immune system. And then, but if you breathe in, if somebody has the plague in coughs and you breathe it in, it gets into your lungs, it's called pneumonic plague. And that has almost 100% death rate. And then if you actually get it into your bloodstream in a different way, it actually circulates through your bloodstream, not in the immune system and the way it does with bubonic. And that's called septicemic, and that will kill you almost every time. But so people assumed it was a bubonic plague because a lot of people had buboes, which are kind of a big sign of it.

But they, a number of years ago, a number of geneticists decided to do a test. They looked at, they wanted a test to see if there were genetic change that you could see as a result of the black death. In other words, did the people who died, die because they had certain genetic dispositions, the people who survived to another one? and which would have then, you know, Darwinian selection would select for the people who had the one that would allow them to survive. So they wanted to see if there's a shift that they could detect. And they started to do a bunch of testing. And they came across this weird, this gene called CCR5 Delta 32. And it's a gene that controls a little tiny receptor on the white blood cell.

And what they discovered was that the percentage of the population that had this mutation of this CCR5 Delta 32 was like one out of 20 people before the 1300s. I'm sorry, one out of 20,000 people before the 1300s. And today it's one in ten in parts of England and et cetera where they're doing the testing. And so they're pretty sure that somehow something along in there was testing, was selecting for this gene. And what's, but what's interesting is that gene would really only matter if you're talking about a virus. Because it's only a virus that would lock onto this receptor on a white blood cell and infect it. Bacteria don't do that. And so this caused a lot of people to wonder if the black death was actually not the bubonic plague that people thought it was,

if it was actually something else. And there's actually another disease called a haemorrhagic fever, which is a virus, which can cause a lot of the same symptoms as vivonic plague. But it doesn't cause buboes. So historians are kind of like, well, you know, we got this one thing that something clearly was, some virus was clearly infecting Europe in 1300s because we can see this genetic shift happening. And, but that would have been a virus. But then the plague happened, which is the obvious culprit,

but it seems to be, you know, with the buboes, it would seem to be your sinia pestis, which is bacterium. And so, you know, some people still say, oh, it's just bubonic plague and something else caused the shift in the mutation in the gene. But other people are saying, no, it was hemorrhagic fever and maybe bubonic plague together. Because there are cases of where viruses and bacteria often work together. In other words, that the virus weakens the host and that allows the bacteria to

suddenly spread pretty rapidly because of the weakened hosts. So you get one disease piggybacking on another one. So some people have suggested it was hemorrhagic fever with bubonic plague piggyback in the back of it. And listening to you talk, I go, I'm so happy we live in the time and age we do right now. Yeah. Right? With people, you know, I assume there's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people working on trying to figure this out so that they can essentially get us immune or essentially try and find the cure for it, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. Back a hundred years ago, would they have had any sort of remedy for even the Spanish flu or

like I know? No, no, they had, I mean, you know, today you can cure bubonic. plague that's antibiotics. It's really not a big deal. So it is a good time to be alive in that sense. But yeah, for the Spanish flu, they had really nothing. They initially thought the Spanish flu was a bacterium because they didn't know really much about viruses at all. And so they thought it was a bacterium. And they actually did lots of testing on Spanish flu victims. And they found a bunch of bacteria in the, you know, Spanish flu caused, usually killed you with the pneumonia. which is a bacterial infection in your lungs that fills your lungs up with fluids.

And so the, and they kept finding certain strains of bacteria, you know, streptococcus, staphlicoccus, something called Pfeiffer's bacteria in people's lungs. And they thought that was causing the Spanish flu. Well, we now know it's a virus, but that the virus weakened the immune system. So these bacteria, which are always there, they're always on your skin and whatever, could suddenly go crazy because your immune system was compromised. and that's what was causing the pneumonia. So it actually was two different diseases hitting at the same time.

You could get the Spanish flu, which is a high fever, running nose, body aches, headache, but it's sometimes turning to pneumonia if bacteria that normally your body kept in check got out of control because the fluid weakened your immune system. So they actually thought it was bacteria and they actually came up with a bunch of vaccines against the bacteria, which didn't do anything against the disease. the flu because it wasn't that wasn't what the flu was.

But they had lots of vaccines in 2018, 19, and 20. They were cranking out vaccines everywhere, but none of them really did anything because none of them were actually a vaccine for the flu. But it's kind of an interesting side thing. And it's they actually did, they figured out eventually what the Spanish flu, well, there's a theory that they've never proven because they can't get a good, DNA read on Spanish flu but it actually think it was a mutation of swine flu that actually swine flu is a weird little thing and it shows up in pigs right and it shows up for

three months every year meaning that with with certain pig populations you get an outbreak for three months every winter and nobody could figure out why it was there three months every winter and they finally realized that it was actually a three things going on was that one is there was a there was a parasite that a certain type of worm that lived in the soil that had a life cycle that had to be in pig intestines and then it had to go into the soil and then it had to get eaten by worms and then the worms had to be eaten by pigs and it had this life cycle had to go through and it's on an annual cycle so the pigs are actually eating this thing but the the swine flu virus was was piggyback on the

parasite. So when the parasite infected the pigs, the virus infected the pigs, and then you got the swine flu outbreak. But what was actually killing the pigs was the swine flu was causing their immune system to crash. And then the various bacteria were causing pneumonia which killed the pigs. They think a similar thing minus the parasite was happening with Spanish flu that it was actually a flu. With the Spanish flu? Yeah. And one theory that they haven't been able to prove is that it was actually a mutation of swine flu that turned in Spanish flu in 1918. With this

current situation as things like I don't know how much how I don't know how much longer it goes on but when it starts to subside, curb, slow down, whatever words you want to use

do you think then if you look back at some of the old ways these things went through that the fall we're destined for another essentially a second wave when it gets colder because aren't a lot of these viruses not as well equipped for the warmer weather which thankfully I mean up here we're happy the sun's out let alone anything else and that should help with this somewhat yeah I'm yeah I mean I'm I'm not a microbiologist but my understanding is that things like the flu virus are seasonal because they they can survive longer outside of the human. the body in a dry air and so winter is better for them.

The moist air, they start to break down, I guess. I don't know. With all the things that have come before, though, has there ever been one that just comes through and it's one wave? Just once and then gone? Unfortunately, not really. I mean, there was a plague in the 500. It's called the Justinian plague.

Might have been Yersinia pestis. It might have been hemorrhagic fever, who knows. But it came through killed maybe 25, 30 percent of the population in the 500s. But it came back every 20, 30 years for the next 200 years. And then if you look at the black deaf, you know, it shows up in 1348, rips through the population. But it kept coming back until, I mean, it's still, debonic plague is still around. But the black death kept causing epidemics, you know, every 30, 40 years. for the next several hundred years, 400 years.

And so I think that we're probably, and if you look at influenza epidemics, there's usually at least two waves, that you usually get a first wave and then a break off in the summer and then another wave in the fall. So I would, I hate to say it, but I wouldn't be at all surprised

if we got another wave in the fall, especially if people start saying over the summer, we'll open up again and we'll start going back to normal and etc. Well, the nice thing though, or not the nice thing, maybe the, on the silver lining is we're not talking about 30% of the population. We're talking about, right?

You're talking about, well, I don't even know what the, in Canada, it's not even a percent. It's less than that. Yeah, and that's a really big question with coronavirus is what percentage of people who, what percentage of the population is going to get? It's called the R0 number. And then of the people who get it, what percentage actually are going to get sick and die?

And, you know, something like hemorrhagic fever, I mean, the death rate's just about 100%. So if you get it, you're dead. And that's why the death rates are so high with something like the black death. you know, death rates, you know, 50% of the population, that is, that's astonishingly high. We're nowhere, you know, coronavirus is nowhere near that. They don't know how many, it's hard to get a good read on coronavirus because as I was

mentioned earlier, we don't, we just don't, there's so many people are asymptomatic that it's probably way, there are way more people who have been infected with it than we know about. So we can't get a good read on a death rate, like how many people who are exposed to it, die from it, but it's, it's almost certainly down, you know, 3%. at the most and probably closer to 1%. But, you know, it sounds like no big deal, but, you know, if it's, it's, if it's infection rate is really high, and some people are saying that by the time this is over, probably, you know,

50, 60% of the population is going to be infected with coronavirus at some point. Then, you know, 1% starts to sound like a lot. Well, do the math for me. What's 1% of, well, what's the? I mean, suppose 50% of the population gets infected and 1% of those die, then you're talking half a percent of the entire population would die in the epidemic, which, you know, for 7.6 billion people, that's like several hundred million, $350 million. If I did my math rate, I might be off by 10 there. But even if you're talking $35 million, that's huge.

Now, I don't think the death rate's actually getting treated about that high. Once we figure out how many people are infected, because I think a lot of people are asymptomatic. That's what I'm reading. So it's probably not going to be that high. But, I mean, people compare this to the regular seasonal flu. They're like, well, it's a big deal. This is 1% death rate.

Well, seasonal flu is 1 tenth of 1%. death rate. And that kills 35,000 people a year in the U.S. And so, you know, this could be 10 times, kill 10 times as many people as a, of which who infects than the flu does, which is, so then the next argument always comes is, although it is killing more than the regular flu, right now the economy is not doing so great. No, absolutely. What? Oh, man. I don't even know where to go with this because I go like,

is there anything even remotely close in history where I can't, can you think of any time in history where the economy shut down almost overnight and everything in the world is just not moving? And there's just... No, I mean, there's no parallel in history that I'm aware of of, something this global hitting economies everywhere. Because, I mean, it's really, you know, all around the world. I don't know how I think it's, I think every country in the world has at least one case,

and they're all having to deal with this, and they're all doing various levels of shutting down, et cetera. So I'm not aware of anything that would cause this, you know, this level of shutdown immediately. The closest parallel would be something like the Great Depression, which over the course of a couple years spread around the world. But even that didn't hit undeveloped countries much. And the agricultural societies were still just going on and producing food and whatever. It was the depression really only hit the big industrialized countries hard because they were the ones who had an economy that was geared towards, you know, that kind of employment.

So I'm really not aware of anything like this. I mean, even the even something like the black death, which killed, you know, half of the population and caused huge economic turmoil. know, people weren't, and people did shut down their societies. When the black death came, everybody, you know, just stopped going out of their house, you know, because they were terrified of it. And everybody's, you know, if you had a house in the countryside, you fled to the countryside. And if you didn't, you just hunkered down in your house in the city. So that did cause economic shutdowns, but it was a rolling shutdown in the sense that, you know, the plague hit Italy in early 1348. It hit France.

in the middle of 1348, in England and late 1348, 49. So, you know, the shutdown hit different regions at different times. I'm not aware of anything in history that hit everything all at once, the way this has. Well, and what you're talking about there is we've never been this interconnected. Like, where it's just travel simultaneous and there, you know, I mean, the population, of the world back 18's like 1.6 billion roughly? Yeah, I haven't looked up that number,

but I know the population of the U.S. was about 100 million as opposed to 330 million today. That's right. And so now you got what, 7.8, 7.8, 7.6 billion? Yeah. And, you know, the plane coming in and then just the travel and the interconnectedness is something you say history doesn't repeat because it really it's hard to mimic what technology

is going to do to everything else. But it has allowed it instead of having a rolling one within a two-month window, the entire world came to a screeching halt. Right, right. And it's what, there's another way in which we're sort of, we're in a bad place because we know so much. I mean, people in the middle ages or whatever, I'd no idea what the disease was doing. So they didn't have as much knowledge about what the stakes were, but we actually, you were sort of alluding to this, we have to make these tough decisions because we know what it's doing to the economy. We know exactly what it's doing to the economy because we have statistics from all over the world and we can put dollar amounts on how much the shutdown is costing us, et cetera. And we know we have pretty

good models of how many people are going to die. And we have pretty good sense of how we react is going to cause this many people that I or that many people that I and this much economic damage and that. And so we're actually in a really tough spot because we actually have enough knowledge to make and perform decisions. And we really have to make a decision, which is, you know, it's tougher because we know exactly that we are making a tradeoff between the economy and people's lives, you know. And that's a much harder decision to make than when you don't have any idea what you're doing and you're just guessing. Well, and you're just praying. Well, and you're just praying to the Lord above that it's going to go away, right?

Like, you go back, 800, 1,500 years ago or further, and you just didn't have, well, they weren't in the same spot as this is right now. Right, right. And there was a, I mean, the culture itself had a much greater sense of what we'd call fatalism. You just, you couldn't control stuff, you know, it was in the hands of God. Because we simply didn't understand and know enough. But we have a whole lot less of that sense now. we really think we do know how to manipulate the economy and we really do know how to handle an epidemic

and we really do know how to you know manage all this stuff and so it's it does make it a lot puts a lot more on our shoulders because we actually have to make an informed decision because we actually can now which is uh makes it harder well you want you just wonder over the next month if it hasn't tamed down which it very well may not, at what point they're going to have, you know, that way skill gets out and you go, wow, what do we do here? Yeah.

Well, you know, it's an interesting thing because the, there was a sort of a miniature form of this. I don't think I've talked about cholera on here yet. The collar is a disease that's a bacterium that's traveled by water. And it basically, if your water is contaminated by by human waste, it can pass from one person who has it into other people through water. And basically cholera causes massive diarrhea.

It can actually kill you to dehydration in about 24 hours. You can actually lose about five gallons of water through diarrhea in 24 hours. And say that again, five, what? Five gallons of water. five gallons. Yes. And it's like 25 thirds and your body weight. Oh.

It's an absolute massive flushing of your system. And it's actually, today they can control your wheel out because they know that if you just keep replacing those fluids, you'll get over it in a day or two. And they've actually had scientists now studying cholera will actually give huge numbers of volunteers cholera because they know it won't kill them because they can keep rehydrating them until the body handles it. But at the time, it had a massive death rate. It killed 30% of the people who got it, 40%. It was really high. And it appeared, it's one of the first epidemics that really is because of globalization, because it's endemic to India, but it spread along trade routes.

And then especially with British shipping in the Indian Ocean, it started to escape from India and you get these blow-up epidemics in a city. And basically what happened is if the city had a bad sewage system where it's where human waste got into drinking water, once cholera hit, it just spread like wildfire. Everybody got it. And so you'd have these massive epidemics breaking out. And they would cause whole cities to shut down. But nobody knew exactly what to do with it. But when they finally figured out exactly what it was, they ran into the same sorts of decisions that we've been talking about where they were having to figure out, are they going to cause the economic data?

damage to save people's lives. Are they going to, because like, a really famous collar epidemic was in 1854 in London. There was a collar epidemic in the Soho neighborhood in London. And it just hit all of a sudden, and all of a sudden, all these people are getting sick. And, you know, dozens of people are dying in this one neighborhood. And this doctor named the actual, the, the, the theory at the time was the disease was spread by miasmas or bad smells. They thought that the smell of sewage actually caused disease. And so in the years before that, in order to handle London at this time did not have a real sewer system. They had a whole bunch of streams and things that all fed into the Thames.

And so what the system they did was that everybody had a cesspool in the backyard. They would have a big pool and they would just dump all their waste into there. and then periodically guys called nightsoil men would come in and scoop out all this human waste and cart it out into the countryside and you sell it to farmers as fertilizer. Farmers would use human feces for fertilizer. Yeah, yeah. It works well if you can get past the smell. And night soil men actually made a lot of money.

They were like one of the best paid man labor jobs. I was just going to ask. I wondered if that was a great job. I mean, how do you draw the short stick for that guy? And we actually have one case of a night's oil man who drown falling into a pit of, so we know one guy took the... Terrible way to go. Terrible, terrible, terrible way to go.

But so these cesspools made London smelled horrid because these cesspools are sometimes 20 feet deep, and, you know, every apartment building has one in the backyard, and it's just horrific. And so this guy, this health crusader named Edwin Chadwick really wanted to clean up London. He thought that cholera was caused by the smells of cesspools. And so he convinced the city to require that any new indoor plumbing, the flushed toilet invent existed, but there was no sewer system in London. So people, if they had a flushed into the cesspool out and back. Right. And so he, Chadwick convinced the city that everybody had to run their, uh, connect their toilets to

streams that fed into the temps. Basically, he required everybody to run all their sewage into the Thames, which is the source of the water for the city. Um, and this, of course, dramatically ramped up the possibility of cholera. Did they not realize that they were putting sewage into their drinking water? Did nobody do the, they, they didn't think that was the issue. They thought the issue was the smell. It's just a, not a modern idea then, a modern idea, that sewage and water that you're going to drink is a very, very bad idea. Well, yeah, I mean, they didn't really have any sense of germ theory yet.

Germ theory was still a couple decades in the future. And, I mean, they had the beginnings of germ theory, but they really didn't have any sense of what they were dealing with. And so they didn't know that, for instance, human waste was a source of disease. So they're pumping it into the Thames. And this causes, you know, this would cause a lot of troubles. But so in this outbreak they have in 1854, this, it's just this one neighborhood, has this massive outbreak, hundreds of cases in just a couple days.

And nobody can figure out why. And this one doctor named John Snow, not the guy from Game of Thrones. He was badass. Yeah, he was. This guy was a little different. But John Snowd, he had this idea that maybe cholera was spread by water. And so he starts going around studying. He talks to everybody who has the, he's trying to find out.

There's a priest who was going around all over this neighborhood, helping, you know, giving last rights and things. And he's talking to the priest, who, you know, who had it, you know, where do they get their water? What's, you know, he wanted, he wanted all this information. He's starting to piece it together. And he starts to think it's the, it's this one well. It's called the Broad Street Pump. It's a well with a pump, a hand pump on Broad Street in Soho. And he starts to think it's that.

And so he starts to compile all these numbers on everybody who's gotten the cholera and everybody who's died. And he tries to convince the city of London to take the handle off the pump. He's like, the pump is causing the disease. And they're like, no, no, no. So he finally, he came up with what's called a Veroni map, which is he had a map of of the Soho neighborhood. And he put a dot on the map for every single person

who had gotten cholera. And there's a big cluster around the Broad Street pump. But it wasn't a perfect circle or anything. It sort of had arms that went off in different directions. And it looked more like an octopus or something. So then he did what's called the Veroni drawing, which is he said he decided to figure out for every single house in this neighborhood

what the closest pump was. Because a lot of times, like, streets didn't connect evenly. And so you, you know, you might be just a block away from a pump. He had to walk five blocks around to get there. And there was this other pump that was three blocks. So he did this, he did a drawing of, he figured out for every house where the nearest pump was. And then he drew a boundary around where the area for which the nearest pump was the broad street pump. And it perfectly encircled all the dots.

Right. And so he, and the one exception was this little lady like 10 miles away who had died of cholera. And it turns out that she had grown up next to the Broad Street pump and her son still lived there and they brought her a gallon of water from the Broad Street pump every day. So that she'd have Broad Street pump water. She drank it and died. That's terrible luck. Oh, I know. But what's actually kind of interesting also is that there's a brewery in that area.

And none of the workers in the brewery got cholera because the brewery just let him. drink beer all day. And so the beer killed the collar. And a legend and a legend was formed. Exactly. Drink beer and you won't get cholera. But yeah, so, so snow figures it out and he goes to the city and they're like, take the handle off the broad street pump. It's the broad street pump. And they're like, no, no, we don't we don't believe your theory. But they were really one of the first cases of trying to figure out do we, because they knew that broad street pump was really important for for water for that whole area and it was going to cause an economic disruption and they were going to have to pump in, you know, bring in water from elsewhere, et cetera. And so they were really

weighing, you know, do we think this is human deaths or do we think this is, you know, do we want the economic disruption or do we want the deaths? And eventually he convinced him to take the, take the handle off the pump and the epidemic stopped within the day. And they eventually figured out that they, the priest who had been going around and getting all this information for snow, he actually found out the first case. And he realized that two days before the epidemic had started, the house right across from the Broad Street pump, the apartment building, there was a baby who had died from severe diarrhea,

and he went and talked to the mother, baby Lewis's name, went and talked to the mom. It turned out that she had been thrown the diapers. There had actually been a cesspit in the basement of this apartment building, so she'd been thrown all the diapers into the basement. And it turned out the basement was separated from the Broad Street well by a wall, and the wall had crumbled. And so she was basically throwing her baby's diapers into the same pool of water for the well. And that's killed 700 people, I think, in a couple weeks.

But, you know, it's kind of interesting also because one of the results of that is they finally realize that because of this, once they realize that color is waterborne, that maybe they didn't want to actually, you know, run all the sewage into the Thames. And this priest actually had to do for like 20 years. There were people campaigning to get water companies to stop taking water out of the Thames. And they actually did comparisons to water companies. And the companies that had their own wells didn't have cholera outbreaks. And the companies that took their water out of the Thames did have, you know, cholera outbreaks. So they finally decided to, they finally, in 1858,

they had what they called the great stink of London, which is that in August or July of 1868, temperatures hit 100 and something degrees. And because of the shift in the tides, none of the sewage in the Thames got washed out into the ocean. And so the smell in London was absolutely overwhelming. They had to shut down Parliament because the House of Parliament right next to the Tens.

But before they shut down, Parliament voted to authorize money to build a sewer system for London. So they eventually built the London sewer system. The things we take for granted. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I was thinking, can you imagine being one of the first guys to get a toilet that you don't have to carry it out, right?

It just goes out into the back. You were thinking you're boy, boy, right? Absolutely atop the mountain. But no. But absolutely not. Well, then hospital, like modern hospitals, like what we have in specifically North America. I mean, the developed world, I guess. Like, how many deaths then are we saving, like, if this plague, our current, or this plague, this epidemic, this pandemic, this pandemic.

If coronavirus happened 100 years ago, how much worse could it really have been or really be? I mean, we're still right in the middle of it. But, I mean, you think how far we've come just with, and there's a lot of money. stuff you're talking about there like that it just happened in a short period of time relatively short period of time yeah yeah yeah really probably helped a lot of people pass us and not be nearly as big a deal for a lot of people i suppose oh yeah i mean i mean you know in the pandemic in 1918 they did a lot of the same things we did you know they shut down they had masks you know they understood germ theory um obviously they couldn't do as much because of the war as we were talking about. But the one thing that we, the one huge advantage we have is

we have things like intubation and ventilators that just didn't have. Like if you couldn't breathe on your own, that was it. You know, they couldn't do anything for you back then. We can actually do things for people now. So those sorts of interventions are things that we, we do have now. And of course, we know how to make a vaccine now and we should have a vaccine for coronavirus and, you know, who knows how long. And they couldn't test for influenza either. They had no, because they didn't have anything that could detect a virus, and they didn't know it was a virus, they had no way to test who had been exposed, who was immune, who was immune, et cetera. So once again, so that takes me back to the number of how many people died from it.

Right there it says, well, we think this. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it's totally, because, you know, some people actually died of regular old flu that year. You know, they probably got lumped in the numbers. and then there's a lot of people who probably died from it, and we just don't know. I mean, it spread across, you know, indigenous communities in Alaska and wiped out whole villages, and we just don't know how many people died.

We just, we just have no idea. And it swept through, you know, India and, you know, who knows how many people died. We just don't know. One of the things I'd read on the Spanish flu in particular was New York businesses trying to open staggered, so they were trying to offset how many people were. commuting to work together. Uh-huh. And that didn't work.

Yeah. And I was, I was thinking of all the things, you know, I was curious maybe about all the different things governments tried. I mean, you talk about stay at homes and wearing masks and stuff like that. Did they have anything back then with like shortages of food or toilet paper? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not aware of that. Nothing I've read indicated that was a major issue. I mean, this was also during the war, so there was already rationing of various things going on.

But I'm not aware of being in a sort of hoarding and shortages that we had, but it's quite possible to happen. I just haven't seen anything talking about them. Well, go ahead. No, no, no. Carry on. Sorry. I apologize. I was going to change the subject.

I was going to say that there's one other epidemic that we really have. haven't talked about, which is the whole slew of diseases that swept across North America after the arrival of Europeans, which was a massive loss of life. We don't know what the population of North America in particular and South America was when Columbus showed up, for instance, 1492. But based on estimates that we had, have, and we have some fairly good estimates for things like the Aztec Empire, the Inc. Based on estimates we have, we think that as those diseases swept across the Americas, they killed probably 90% of the Native American population.

The measles and smallpox and mumps and there's a whole slew of European diseases that Europeans were partially immune to, meaning they were childhood diseases. you got them, you got sick, but you survived for the most part. They hit Native American populations that had never been exposed to those diseases, and they had death rates of sometimes 90%, and we know that between, you know, our best estimate for the population in 1492, when Columbus showed up, and then you look at the population of Native Americans in 1650, which is about 150 years later, the Native American population was about 10% in 1650,

what it was in, you know, 1,500, 1492. And this is massive diseases that just swept across the entire population. We actually, there was a, there was a Spaniard named Hernando Soto, Hernando Soto, who landed in Florida in the early 1500s, and he trekked across what we would call the American South, Alabama, Mississippi into Texas and wound up getting back into Mexico where he got back to the Spanish controlled territory. And on that trip, he said that he encountered city after city of sort of major settlements of Native Americans, 10,000 here, 15,000 here, you know, 20,000 here. And he said that, you know, you'd go to one settlement, they'd point you to the next one, and you could see it

over, you know, five miles away. And it was, he said, he described this territory as really densely populated and agricultural and no Europeans went back there for quite some time until those you know mid-1600s and when they came back through the mid-1600s they found a very sparsely populated and everyone thought so though had just been making it up but we're pretty sure now that in fact a huge portion of population had died of diseases during that time and this actually brings me to an interesting a hypothesis that a climate scientist came up with. It's called the Ruddeman hypothesis. And this guy William Ruddeman was a climate scientist. And we know that the Earth's climate

has been shifting in sort of a regular pattern with ice ages and then hot tropical ages pretty regularly for millions of years. And that has to do with things like the, you know, because the tilt of the earth and the orbit of the earth and then the earth wobbles on its axis a little bit it causes all sorts of changes that are sort of this intricate set of things changing the climate and so ice ages are predictable but ruddyman points out that we should have started an ice age in about 8,000 BC we didn't and and he said that if you look If you look at past, you know, you can look at ice cores going back in Antarctica or Greenland or whatever, ice cores go back thousands and thousands of years. And scientists know that CO2 levels and methane levels and things have to do with ice ages and global warming, et cetera. And they said that if you look at CO2 levels, they were dropping and dropping like an ice age is coming. And then about 8,000 BC, they turned around and started rising again.

methane levels started going up too, and those are both greenhouse gases. And we never got the ice age, right? We're 10,000 years in here, and we still haven't gotten the ice age. And so Ruddyman said, well, maybe, you know, he said 8,000 BC is about when human beings started agriculture. They started burning down forest to clear land, and they started putting in rice paddies, which are, which produced a lot of methane gas. And they started keeping livestock and cows and pigs produce methane. from both ends. And he said, well, maybe human beings produce just enough CO2 and methane to actually prevent an ice age. And we've actually been doing global warming since 8,000 BC. And but he said,

but if you go forward a little bit, he said, there has been periods in the last several thousand years where we've had minor changes in climate. There's something called the Little Ice Age began about 1,300 to about 1850. and it certainly affected Europe. There's some evidence it might have affected parts of China.

It didn't really affect the southern hemisphere much. But the temperature dropped about one and a half degrees on average, which is actually a pretty significant drop. And Europeans had periods of famine, and there were these really horrific winters and rivers froze over that nobody had any record of those rivers having frozen over before, et cetera. And Reddyman said,

well if you look at this you know it starts about 1,300 he says if you take his theory that maybe human beings doing agriculture had been pushing off on ice age says you look at the late 1200s and the Mongols caused when they conquered all of Asia and parts of Europe they caused massive loss of life and massive disruption of agriculture especially in China which has all these rice patties and then and then he said the black death comes along in 1348 and causes massive loss of life in the Middle East and Europe. And then he says in the early, late 1500s or early 1600s, there's massive loss of life of Native Americans in the Americas because of various diseases.

And he says, if you look at the climate graph, he says there's a dip about 1,300. It gets much worse after the temperature, average global temperatures drop more after 1,350. and they really drop in like 1640s. They dropped considerably, and they stayed down until the 1850s when the Industrial Revolution started to crank up more CO2. And so he's basically arguing that the Black Death and the Native American epidemics

actually caused the Little Ice Age by killing so many human beings that the amount of agriculture dropped significantly and farmland went back to forest and whatever, and this was a carbon sink and it pulled CO2 out of the air, and reduced greenhouse gases until the Industrial Revolution came along. So Ruddeman is actually arguing that epidemic diseases have been a major influence on climate change

at several points in human history. And there's been some climate research to try to see if Reddyman's right or wrong, and there's some evidence that, especially with the black death and the deaths of Native Americans in the 1600s, that this probably did affect CO2 levels. It matches up pretty well to what we know of CO2 levels from ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. And so it really looks like these epidemics actually had an effect on climate. It's kind of mind-blowing. Yeah, that's something to take it.

Well, it's, well, and you mentioned climate. I mean, in today's age, that is a very hot topic. Oh, yeah. To think that killing off the population of human beings would affect it that much? Well, when you got now when you got 7 billion, if you knocked it down to 3 billion, I would assume that would have some effect. Yeah, yeah. And it's an interesting question because, I mean, it's obviously this is real life and history.

you can't like tease out the variables. You can't run this experiment without the black death and run it with the black death and see what happens with the climate. So you can't really, it's all messy. But there's some clinical evidence that the black death and then the Mongols and then the black death. How long would you need, like would you need a year of something in order to prove that it affected climate change? or would it need like a 10-year period? And what I mean is,

is with the short period of time where everything is shut down. Nobody's flying anywhere. Heck, nobody's driving anywhere. Within a three to five-month period, is that enough time to show anything? Or would it need to be a longer substantiated period? Well, we certainly do see, I mean, you know,

CO2 levels in the climate are cumulative. So we certainly know that we're producing a whole lot less CO2 right now because nobody's driving. That's right. You know, airplane flights your way down. Yeah. And although there is the, I mean, certain airlines are flying what's called ghost flights. Have you heard about this?

No. That they're, in order to hold onto the route, they're right to hold the route. They have to keep flying a certain number of planes. So they're actually flying empty airplanes back and forth on some of these routes just to hold onto the route. So that when the epidemic's over, they still have control of that route. Because if they stop flying it all together, the government, can assign that route to somebody else. And so they're just flying empty planes.

So a guy is literally getting paid to put it on autopilot and have a 12-hour snooze. Yeah. But I mean, these are all, I mean, these are all sorts of, you know, Washington, D.C. to Detroit kind of route. He's just flying back and forth. He's probably doing twice a day. But yeah, they're still flying them. But we certainly have seen a huge impact, not just in CO2 level.

but also in pollution levels. Los Angeles and Beijing or the cleanest air they've had in decades because nobody's driving all of a sudden. And so even just a month has had a huge impact on air pollution. But and so in terms of climate change, you know, something like this pandemic now, we certainly are like hitting pause on putting CO2 out

because we're not doing nearly as much of it. But it's not going to stop a reverse climate change. change because the CO2 takes centuries to get back out of, you know, to come back out of the air. So, uh, so we're really just pausing the process for a moment. We're not reversing or anything like that, which is too bad because, you know, it would be great if we were undoing the damage, but we're really just stopping doing more damage for a while. You wonder what, uh, with, how, how you've been enjoying what's been going on? Because, I mean, you in particular have, uh, now had to do.

essentially like video lectures yeah yeah yeah are you join it um it's it's it's not as good uh you know i i'd be perfectly honest i i sort of like a performer i i feed off the audience a little bit so if there's no audience i mean i got this little i got this little whiteboard up on the wall in my office and i uh and um you know i have a little table i set up my computer on and i just boat It's videotaped my lectures, and it works fine. You know, the sound quality's all right. And I post them to YouTube. Some of my students can watch it.

But it's something not quite there because it's, you know, in a real class, people ask me questions and stuff. And that leads to the- So you're not doing it live then, Paul? No, I'm not doing it live. It's really just, I did a lot of reading in a big hurry when they told us we were going to go online. and the sort of general consensus was that the more you can do was called asynchronously, where students can do it whenever they can do it and you can put it up whenever you can put it up, the better. So I decided to videotape lectures and put them up so students could watch

them whenever because I had students telling me, oh, I went home and now I got to work full time. So, you know, and I'm like, well, I can't do live lectures and those students won't be able to see it. But what's, what's, can't you, and maybe you can correct me on this, can't you do a live lecture, allow people to come and sit in and ask questions and have it be recording at the same time so that when whoever else needs to come see it, it's just there and it has the questions attached to it? In theory, yes. And I've heard from, you know, written, you know, articles written by professors who have tried this stuff. And it apparently has just enough problems that it really doesn't work very well. You know, it's hard for the, if you're, if you're, say, doing it on a Zoom call or go to meeting or

it's, it's often hard for you to see if anybody has a question in the first place. And then you have, you know, if you've got 30, 40 people and there's somebody's going to try to talk at the same time. And it gets kind of difficult to handle. And then, and then there's the whole issue of, you know, the timing and, you know, I mean, you certainly could record it. And that, I think works pretty well. But, yeah, doing 30 people or 25 people on a Zoom meeting is a little vicy, I guess. Well, the performer, the performer in you likes to have the audience, likes to have the 20, 25 students kicking around, grumbling, mumbling, popping their hand up, asking questions, taking you down rabbit holes. Well, it, I mean, it's, you know, it is nice to have them asking questions because sometimes, you know, it's a good feedback for me.

like what I just said wasn't that clear so you know here's a student asking a question tell me you know you got to go back over that that's good um but also uh you know I can tell by watching them when I'm when it's starting to drag or when I'm starting to lose them and when I've really got them you know and so you can you're just I'm not even aware of it but I've thought about it since I've gone to video and there's all sorts of ways you're adjusting the lecture on the fly as you're going based on the reactions of the people. sitting in front yet, you know, but they're really into this. I'll go into it a little more detail or they're, you know, starting to look out the window. I'd better, I'd better move along. And one thing I have learned from, you know, I've been, I've been a college professor now for, I think it's 25 years or something. I've been teaching college students. And one of the things I've really learned is that each class is different, that you might have a lecture that just enthralls one class and you'll do the same lecture again the next year and they're kind of like, you know, checking their watches and looking at their phones and

but then some other part of the lecture by the second group, I love it and the first group I'm not. And it's just, it's kind of baffling, but it's just something I've recognized. You got to. Has there been over your 25 years, has there been a subject that was popular 25 years ago when you first started talking and then now maybe you've even phased it out or it's just not nearly is enthralling? Yeah, definitely. Well, I've been doing this long enough that, you know, when I started teaching, I first, I was a teaching assistant at Penn State. That was the first time I was actually a teacher in a college classroom. And that was, I started in 1992, you know, the fall of Soviet Union

happened one year earlier. And so people wanted to hear about that. They wanted to know what the heck that was all about. They wanted a perspective on that. And, and, you know, I bring up fall of Soviet now and it's, you know, 10 years before my students were a lot more born. So it's like, oh, no, that's not really pressing for them. And it's interesting, even things, the Middle East history class I mentioned earlier is really the one that is just the most sensitive because the, you know, when I started teaching that class in 2001, everyone wanted me to explain 9-11. And then, you know, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was really big in like 2006, 7, 8, and people wanted an explanation for,

that and and then you know 2011 the Arab Spring happens and all these protests all over the Middle East everyone wants to know what that's all about and then Civil War in Syria everyone wants to know what that's all about and oh we're you know we're invading Iraq let's explain that or Afghanistan explain that so it really shifts from just based on current events what people want to explain you know it's not as you know a lot of history of course my medieval history course doesn't shift that much it's pretty consistent everybody loves the Crusades and everyone loves the Black death and they like to hear about castles. But, you know, the ones that you bring up to the present, there's often, and like I teach a course called 20th century ideologies. And it's, that's really shifted a lot. You know, just in the last four or five years, you've seen the rise in what we call the alt-right, you know, and I got to explain that in ideological terms and where's that coming from people want to know and now you've got all the Bernie supporters, Bernie Sanders supporters and you know people are talking about socialism in the United States. So I got to explain that

ideological terms. So it's a it's history is always. Yeah well because what you just mentioned there in the United States specifically what they all right and Bernie and socialism. That's a hot topic right now. Oh yeah. And with Trump at the helm it's an ever hotter topic because He just loves to push buttons. I mean, is there a president in U.S. history that just, I mean, he's got the social media thing is something that no president's ever had before. That may be a little bit Obama. I guess Obama was in the middle of it. But, like, Trump loves pushing buttons.

Like, is there a president ever? Is there a leader ever that just loves to stir everybody up like Trump? I'm trying to think, I mean, I can't really come up with an analogy in history. I mean, there's certainly been people who never became president, but there were political figures who were certainly rabble-rousers, populists, et cetera. In the U.S., you had what's the name, Huey Long and Louisiana, and, you know, you had the Boulanger Affair in France in the 18th. 70s or 1880s and there have been cases of people really sort of starting a sort of a populist

movement and they were clearly pushing buttons and they were they were clearly beating on the anger of their population but i've never seen something like the u.s president the only thing i could think of it's even close and i hate to make this comparison because i don't want to i don't want to go there but i mean there are certain ways in which adolf hitler used that sort of button push effectively. But, you know, you get in trouble comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler, and that's not a, it's not a straight comparison. But he said, both of them certainly used, uh, the sort of the big lie and the hitting fear buttons to hold on the power. Both of them use that very effectively. What's the hidden lie? And the big lie. Or the, sorry, the big lie. Oh, just the idea. I mean, Hitler

actually said this that if you're going to lie, make it a big lie. Because if you make a small lie, people will believe you're lying. But if you lie about something big, that's so big, they won't believe you're lying. And so the idea is that if you're so brash about lying, nobody would believe you'd possibly lie about something that big. And so they believe you. So what did Trump liable and what did Hitler liable? Now, I'm curious. You've got me. Well, I mean, Hitler, of course, lied about the Jews. Okay. Oh, yeah. Duh. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. And, you know, he lied about socialists. He lied about communists.

And, you know, for instance, the Reichstag caught on fire in February of 1933, a month after Hitler got in power. And he claims this a huge communist plot. Well, there was no evidence. It was a communist plot. The guy they arrested was a communist, but he wasn't a member of the German Communist Party. He was Dutch. And there's no evidence that anybody in the German Communist Party had any idea the Reichstag

fire was coming. But Hitler says, oh, this is evident. of a coup attempt by the communists and he arrests all these communist politicians and members of the Reichstag, et cetera, very little evidence, but it's such a huge lie that nobody thought he would lie about something that big, you know? And so they essentially let him get away with it, because it was such an audacious lie. And, you know, Trump lies about things big and small, but, but I mean, he was, and quite frankly, I mean, my personal opinion is, I'm not sure. sure. I honestly don't know how much Trump is actually lying in the sense that a lie is something

where you know what the truth is and you want to tell somebody something different so that they don't know the truth. And I'm not sure Trump has a clear enough distinction between what reality is and what he wants to actually make any distinction. I think Trump is not aware that reality doesn't line up with what he's saying. I think he just says whatever he wants and doesn't, its relation to reality is nebulous. So I'm not sure Trump is actually lying in the sense of intentionally deceiving people. I think Trump believes whatever comes out of his mouth,

but he says whatever he wants to believe, which is a very different thing. But I think the effect is different that Trump actually lies about, and he actually lies about things that are, you know, often huge things about immigration or whatever that are fairly easily disprovable, but he's so certain when he's so certain

when he says it, people think, oh, he wouldn't lie about something that big, you know. So he gets away with it. That's a tough comparison. I know that's why you're hesitant to say it because. Yeah, because I mean, you know, there's a huge difference between the Holocaust and anything Trump's done. So I'm not making that comparison, but. No, no, no. But the question was, is anybody in history basically as a public figure been similar to Trump?

And that's the name. And it's funny, the word or the name Hitler is, there's almost like a square, I swear. Like it's, it's a hard thing to spit out. Yeah. And yeah, it's, it's got a lot of, it's got some hard guttural stops in there. It's a, it's kind of spit it out. It's true. Although, you know, Hitler's father or grandfather, I forget, which changed his name to Hitler.

It was originally Shicklegruber. And I keep thinking if he hadn't changed his name, you know, history probably would have been different because nobody would have elected shickle group or a ticketator. That's good. That's good. Well, I guess I just want to say thanks for hopping on.

It was an interesting way to end the, the episode going, you know, somehow we, Kristen Gispari, if she's out there, she, her and I were good friends at,

college and we always talked about your classes. and she always had a fascination with World War II, specifically Germany and what Hitler was able to pull off. So it only seems fitting that on the podcast, I do with you, if she ever hears this, Hitler came in at the very end. All right. What I do at the end of my podcast, I have a final five question crewmaster final five. They're a sponsor here in town. So it's five questions that can go as long or short as you want. If you're going to sit down and have coffee with one person in history, it doesn't matter if they're alive or past present, who would you want to sit down with?

That's a really good question. I think, I mean, I'm going to give you like three different answers. If it was, if there's sort of a mystery of what is, often when I study historical figure, I'm just like, what was this person like? I mean, they seem sort of surreal. Hitler is one like that. You're just like, what the hell was he actually like if you met him? And so, you know, I'd probably pick, you know, somebody like maybe Napoleon because I often go, well, what was he really like? You know, because we have this image of this short guy who was sort of insecure and whatever, and that's just a caricature and that's really not who he was.

And so he's kind of been hidden by his myth. So, you know, I would be interested to sit down and talk Napoleon and just see what he's like. But in another sense, there are people around whom there's sort of a mystery of like, you know, what really happened there, et cetera. And, you know, so there are people like Lucretia Borgia or something who is this Renaissance member of the Borgia family and has a reputation of being, you know, totally debached and, you know, kind of evil. But there's enough mystery around what did she actually do. It would be interesting to sit down and talk to her, assuming I spoke Renaissance Italian. But, you know, there are lots of figures that I think would be kind of fascinating.

I've always been kind of fascinated by Joan of Arc, you know, 16 years old and did what she did. She'd be kind of interesting to talk to for a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. There's also a guy, Chin Shihwang-Di. He was a, he was a Chinese guy. He basically in the 1840s, he converted to Christianity, and then he had a, he had a nervous breakdown,

and he was delirious for a couple weeks. And he, when he recovered, he had had a dream, his delirium that he had realized that he was Jesus Christ younger son. or younger brother, and that God had sent him to earth to convert China to Christianity. And he started a religious movement, and he actually, it turned into such a huge religious movement. He actually took over the southern half of China and ruled it for about 20-some years before the Chinese government finally managed to wipe him out in the 1860s. And he, in the course of his rebellion, it's called the Taiping Rebellion, about 30 million people,

people died. And it'd be kind of interesting to just talk to this guy, Chin Shihong to just to see what made him tick, you know, because he was really a, he came out of nowhere and he sort of had this huge impact on China and then he just sort of, you know, he got, he dives and his movement fizzles into nothing like that. It's just this sort of enigma. It's like, what, what was that? So that'd be an interesting one. And what was his name? Chin Shihang Di. I'm sorry.

No, I'm sorry. I've been saying the wrong name. His name is Huang Shu Chuan. I'm sorry. I said Chin Shong Di. That's the first, the founder of the Chin Dynasty, wrong century and everything. Sorry. Brain fart there.

His name was Hong Shu Chu Chuan. And, yeah, if you look up the Taiping revolt or the Taiping Rebellion, you can Wikipedia. You can, you'll see. the whole thing, but it's a, it's a really fascinating period of history. And there's a really good book called God's Second Son by Jonathan Spence, who talks about it. But he'd be an interesting one to talk to in history. Hong Shui Chuan, not Chin Chongvi. If you, if you could go one place, where would you go? Or, hmm, I'm assuming you mean it as a place I'd like to see once in my life, rather than a place I'd just like to spend a week because it'd be really nice. Correct. Sorry. Yep.

I don't know if I was going to go, you know, pick a once in a life kind of trip right now. I might go to either Japan or to a tour of China, one of us two. I've never been. Right to the heart of the coronavirus, go right to China. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, maybe now is not the best time to go. Especially Japan, they get a big outbreak starting again. Why those two places? Well, I taught a Chinese history class at Northland for a couple of years.

And I just thought it was a really fascinating. It was just such a different place. And it's got so much history because, I mean, China has continuous civilization going back to, you know, 500 BC in a way that no other place on Earth. I mean, they've been the longest sort of stable, civilized society, you know, in human history. And it'd be really interesting for me to just see, you know, see what it's like. I don't know. I guess I can't really explain why it's interesting. When you say it's the longest standing stable civilization, why do you think that is?

Partly because it's a really fertile region. I mean, there's a reason China has 1.6 billion people or whatever they have now. Because it's a really fertile region. And so it's always been a cradle of human civilization. But also just there, for various reasons, Chinese culture has been incredibly stable. And Confucianism, I mean, there are some periods where Buddhism was ascendant, but Confucianism has really been sort of a dominant ideology since 200 BC. And, you know, the communists pretty much tried to squash it,

but it's still making a comeback today in China. So that's a real sort of cultural foundation. It's been so stable throughout Chinese history. And they've had fairly unified governments. I mean, they've had long dynasties, you know, the Ming and the Qing and the Song dynasty was pretty long last. They've just had a whole lot of stability than places like Europe never had or Americas or Africa or whatever.

If you could recommend one book, or would you choose? That's a good one. I've, geez, I don't know if you know, I've read a few books. No, you? No. Well, you know, I was just, I just came, I was thinking about stuff for pandemics that, for this class, I mean, for this podcast here on. And I came across a book that I'd read a while ago.

It's really a cool book. It's called The Ghost Map. And it's about John Snow and the cholera epidemic in London, 1854. But it's really well written. It's by Stephen Johnson. And it's, I like assigning it. And it's a book that I would actually just pick up and read again and again. But my favorite novel of all time is the name of the rose by I'mberto Echo.

I don't know if you're familiar with that. No, I can't say I am. It was actually made into a movie. Sean Connery years ago. But it's a murder mystery set in a monastery in like the 1200s in Northern Italy. And this, these monks start dying. And the way they're dying, it makes people think

that it's actually, they're being murdered in ways to match the Book of Revelations and the apocalypse. And there are two visiting monks who are trying to solve this. And they're basically Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but they never call them that, of course. And what's the book called? The name of the rose.

The name of the rose. By Umberto Echo. He's an Italian. He was actually an Italian semi-eatician, but he, which meant he was an academic, but he wrote fiction. His last name was Echo ECO.

That's a great book. I love that book. I love Catch-22 also by Joseph Heller. It's a great book. What part of history do you think is forgotten about? You mentioned the Spanish flu was kind of forgotten until recently. When looking back, what part of history do you think people don't know about and should know about?

I mean, that's really culturally specific because, you know, there are, you know, certain cultures remember things a lot, and then other cultures don't remember that at all. I think that's a really tough question. I think there's a certain way, especially in the West, that we really are ignorant of Chinese history. Chinese history in so many ways has been the history of the world, and we just are not aware of that in the West, because especially in the last 400 years,

China has not been the big powerhouse, but for the 2,000 years before that, it was. And if there was any place that could claim to be the center of the world for most of human history, it's China. But in the West we focus on the rise, you know, the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and all this European, because Europe has been, and Western civilization has been really dynamic in the last three, 400 years. We tend to forget that China was like the place for, you know, most of human history. No, that's, well, it's very true. Right? I mean, you just, the Renaissance is something we very very,

much focus on. Yeah. And I mean, you know, and those are, and with good reason, because I mean, the Industrial Revolution has really transformed the world. That's right. But if you look at most of human history, you know, China was where it was at. Well, your final one, if you could sit in someone else's history class, is there a guy out there that was a mentor of yours or you fall along with his work

or something along that lines? I had a bunch of really good history teachers and professors. I really benefited from that. I think I probably would have really enjoyed. I think he's retired now. He's pretty old. But Robert Danton was a historian. I think he's at Harvard.

And I loved a lot of his books on the Enlightenment era. But I think I would have really enjoyed sitting in in his classes. maybe William Cronin, he's an environmental historian, Don Madison. I actually know him, but I've never said in his classes. I think that would be fun. Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. I really did, I mean, I was a TA for several professors,

so I got to sit in on their classes. And Gary Gallagher at Penn State is a Civil War historian. He's really good at lecturing. and I wish I could have said on more of those. There was a Chinese history professor. I had at UC Rivano. I was a TA for Bin Wong. This is really good.

You probably, like, do you ever sit in on any other class? Yeah, actually they do because I'm a senior faculty member now. So all the people who are tenure track, they have to get evaluated for six years. And then we decide whether to give them tenure, which means you basically are there for life. I should have meant you don't go to a different school and sit in on any class. No, I never get to do that. Although there are lots of online things, you know, MOOCs and stuff, the massive online courses that are you can just sign up for. Yeah.

That are at other universities. Well, thanks for hopping on with me, sir. I enjoyed this. It was a good. to catch up with you. Oh, it's nice to talk to you again. It's been, well, it's been a while. It's been a while.

And it's nice to listen to, well, go back down some stuff in history and just realize that, you know, what we're going through, although unprecedented in certain ways, has been happening since the beginning of time, essentially. Yeah. Yeah, there's something comforting on that and there's something really disturbing about that. You know, in one sense, we're not facing anything nobody's faced before, but in another sense, you know, we just keep screwing up. That's right. Well, thanks again, and appreciate you hopping on. Thanks.

It was nice talking to you. Okay. Thanks, Paul. Hey, folks, thanks again for joining us today. If you just stumble on the show and like what you hear, please click subscribe. Remember, every Monday and Wednesday a new guest will be sitting down to share their story. The Sean Newman podcast is available for free. on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever else you find your podcast fix.

Until next time.