StarTalk Radio - Zombie Apocalypse (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 9, 2013

The Zombie Apocalypse rages on as Neil deGrasse Tyson hunts for the truth with World War Z author Max Brooks and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and virus expert Laurie Garrett. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. An astrophysicist is what I am, and I direct the Hayden Planetarium right here in New York City. My co-host this week, Eugene Merman. Hello. This is part two of our show on zombies. Yeah, zombies, viruses.

Yeah, zombies as a metaphor for the spread of viruses and other infectious diseases. And there was so much to talk about in that last segment. It's spilling over into this hour. And we'd swapped out our guests. Yeah. All right. Previously, we had an expert virologist because he told us even what a virus was. Yeah, he told us there were viruses that love gold.

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

Oh, that's the one I keep being afraid of. In sight here. Lori Gart, welcome to StarTalk Radio. Thank you, Neil. Is Eugene, is he justified in being afraid of Ebola as much as he is? Well, I'm not like afraid of it like I won't leave the house. Right. Well, is he, is it justifiable fear of that yeah well i don't think you're going to see a

bolivirus turning up in new york city anytime soon right if ever oh good so great but when i've been what about boston i go there sometimes similar because it's closer to the middle of ebola epidemics and uh the real problem in an epidemic is spread inside of hospitals oh really yeah so keep people apart so one man hospitals no it's that we have and this was true with the sars virus i was in china through the whole sars epidemic and in all those hospitals and i go to epidemics that's what yeah i was worried about The way some people follow the band Phish, you follow epidemics around the world. I thought she caused them. Yeah, I just happened to be there.

It's getting suspicious. The accusation has been made by others. And I want another Pulitzer Prize from it. Also for this hour, we're continuing with my clips from my interview with Max Brooks, who is one of the world's, the leading expert in the world on zombies, which we've analogized to Outbreak.

And why don't we get to my first clip from him, which puts Outbreak in the context of politics and culture. And then we come right back to Laurie. Let's check it out. I think the reason the zombie craze is so crazy right now is because we're living in such anxiety ridden times you're exploiting those anxieties i started with me remember i i didn't okay so you're the excuse that you're giving yourself going down this path i didn't need the global financial meltdown to give me anxiety i had that anxiety at 12 years old okay so you're an anxious kid but so now this is catharsis for you well it is because it's the one apocalyptic scenario that we can feel empowered. Oh, right. Because you can actually come upside their head with a

baseball bat. Right. You cannot hit a credit default swap in the head. You just can't do that. Nor can you hit an unseen virus in the head. You can't do it with a virus. So these are macroscopic viruses. Right. So it's the one thing you can actually do something about. Because all these anxieties from 9-11 to Katrina to swine flu, bird flu, all these things that are hitting us, everybody feels so powerless, especially when a president tells you to go to the mall. So you really feel powerless. And at least in a zombie plague, you think, okay, here's the one thing where, yes, we can. Plus, unless you're really inept, you're going to win a fight with a zombie. Yeah.

If you keep a cool head, and as the British say, keep calm and carry on, you'll be all right. And carry a big stick. I was invited to speak at the U.S. Naval War College because the president of the college, Admiral— Wait, did they know something we don't know? Well, the part that kept me up at night was— Were they breeding zombies for the next military encounter? I wish it was just zombies. Admiral Weisskopf said to me, you know, if you take the zombies out of World War Z, apparently I have presented a very credible step-by-step scenario of how society could unravel. Sleep tight, everybody. Your contribution to the genre

is the extent and depth to which you're thinking about the reaction function, if I will, of culture, of society, and of people. Right. Because I don't want to do little adventure stories of sort of, there's a group of people and they got some guns and they're going to go from point A to point B. I want to think, how would the government react? How would you reorganize the economy? How do you feed a hundred million refugees when the global supply chain has shut down? And the point that I tried to make in World War Z is that it's a global crisis, because I think there are no real American crises anymore, except maybe Snooki. But, I mean, the problem is the world's problems are America's problems,

and isolationism just doesn't work anymore. So I wanted to also see how other countries might react to a zombie plague, not just the USA. Laurie, are we doing the right thing when plagues break out, or do we overreact? Oh, well, it depends which plague and what the nature of the plague is. Black plague. I was in a black plague epidemic in India in 1994, and the reaction was insanely wrong. Insanely wrong. Because now we know how to deal with plague. We have antibiotics

and it's really simple with penicillin. And what did they do in 94? Oh my God, they went berserk. It was in a place called Gujarat and a town called Surat and pretty much everybody that had money and power abandoned the town and left all the lower caste Indians to themselves with only four or five government doctors. That was it. And all the private sector physicians, the Ayurvedics, they all deserted, jumped ship. And the panic that ensued was just phenomenal. And then the government refused to show up, the New Delhi. When the minister of health showed up he jumped off the plane announced that he had cured his own cancer by drinking his own urine for many years and jumped back on the plane terrified and left everybody and then all sorts of people started claiming it

was a pakistani conspiracy and that the pakistanis had made the plague and released it to kill indians and it just immediately went geopolitical how much of this is because there's a profound absence of science literacy? Oh, absolutely. Okay. Science literacy is the— Would a pamphlet have helped some of this? No, if they could read. No, science illiteracy is absolutely at the root of most insane responses to epidemics,

because if you're rational and you know how microbes work you know how to protect yourself and you won't drink your urine once you know not to cure cancer yeah drinking urine doesn't cure cancer let's just let people know i'm not a scientist but you'll back me up right i absolutely i'm with you saying that antibiotics could stop the black plague yes it's a bacterial disease yersinia pestis in fact i think I think they give that for Lyme disease, the same antibiotic regimen. I read what it cures, and the whole

list was like stuff from 500 years ago. I'm thinking, if I ever get a time machine, I'm bringing that stuff back with me. Well, being a cosmologist, you're the most likely candidate for time. Yeah, I'm not authorized to divulge. Yes, you already have done it. We know, Neil.

When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more of my interview with Max Brooks, world's expert on zombies, and Laurie Garrett, who's going to tell us how societies react to viral outbreaks. We'll see you StarTalk Radio. You can find us on the web at www.startalkradio.net. I've got Lori Garrett in studio with me, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's thought most of her life about the spread of infectious diseases. And in that first segment,

she was suspiciously in all the places where there were viral outbreaks. Yeah. And she tells us that she was not the cause of them. It's her job to cure them. It's a good cover story, I have to say. So I'm going to want to know, what are all the ways to thwart the spread of viruses?

And I've got also my interview with Max Brooks. In case you don't know, Max Brooks was like a zombie guy. I mean, he wrote The Zombie Survival Guide, and that's a book, another one, World War Z, feature-length movies being based on it, starring? Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt. So that means you have to watch it.

Mr. Handsome. Mr. Handsome Dude. Mr. Angelina Jolie. You know what's interesting about that is that the other metaphor for the spread of disease that's been constantly raised is vampires. I thought you were going to say Brad Pitt. constantly raised as vampires and certainly the whole you're gonna say brad pitt no but the whole the whole vampire phenom is definitely an outgrowth of the hiv epidemic and uh brad pitt made his career playing a vampire yes that was his initial breakthrough role that was his monster across from uh across from tom tom cruise exactly interview with a vampire you want to know

an inside trick on that one they had to dig a trench deep enough that when Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt walked side by side, Brad Pitt was shorter than Tom. That's what happens when you're the lead. It fooled me. Even to this day, I'm like, what a tall man Tom Cruise is. Well, one big difference between vampires and zombies is that it's a lot harder to kill a vampire. But it's a virus that also spreads. Let's go to my interview with Max Brooks. Find out all the ways to kill a zombie

and see what analogies we can draw to the ways to stop the spread of viruses. Can a bow and arrow kill a zombie? Yeah, but remember, a bow and arrow has to be used by an archer. You know, Elizabethan archers practiced from boyhood to become a good archer. They were good. You can't just pick up a bow and arrow and go Robin Hood. You know, that does not work. So if you want to become an archer in a zombie plague, you better start practicing right now.

Okay, but will one arrow kill him? Oh, yeah, it'll go right through. And then kill him? Oh, yeah. I mean, an English longbow actually has more punch than a musket. Right. And that's what got rid of armor. This longbow just penetrated armor

like it was butter. Yeah. So do I have to shoot the zombie in the heart? Through the head, through the brain. Destroy the brain, you destroy the ghoul. That's been the rule since 1968. And you're sticking with it? I'm sticking with it. So the rest of the body doesn't matter? No, the rest of the body is just the vehicle. But the brain is the command center. Okay, so shovel works. Shovel works just fine you don't know good hand weapon good machete machetes are the best zombies do they have to stay warm i mean can you freeze them out can you heat them but what's there you freeze them but then they'll fall so oh because they're they're not alive to be killed right right right so they're just viruses

they're just viruses so springtime comes and they're up and at them again okay so you can delay them you can delay them okay and how about like flamethrowers and stuff that'll work i guess it works but think about it when's the last time you threw a steak on the grill and it burst into flames no it doesn't so you you wouldn't be burning and you'd be cooking them right you'd need a lot of fire to burn one zombie right in fact the human body has a lot of fluid in it you can't just ignite fluid right and most people don't understand when you die of a burn you die because the fluid has come out of your body right right so i came up with something in World War Z called your resource to kill ratio, which is literally how much resources you have

to use to kill one zombie because it becomes a war of economics. So you don't have unlimited resources and zombies are coming at you. What's the cleanest, simplest way to kill a zombie? The cleanest way I would say would be to decapitate with some kind of saber some kind of saber some kind of uh curved bladed weapon because the thing is even crushing the skull is going to take a lot of effort you're going to be burning calories and the truth is once you've decapitated him the head is still biting it's a landmine but it's not it's not mobile it's not mobile so step away because mobile. So step away. Because the point is to survive, not to engage. Your job is to escape and evade.

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

And I think that's what people don't understand. Everyone thinks a zombie plague is going to be like a video game, which is essentially a sprint. It's not a sprint. It's a marathon. Plus in a video game, it doesn't count your calories that you've expended to kill what you just did. Or the amount of water in your system. Right. Or the access to water. Right. Access to water or energy. If you get sleepy and you're going to start messing up and remember, get sleepy, sleepy, you're going to sleep. And just think about every time you pull a trigger, where is the next bullet going to come from? Right. Who's making bullets? Right. Zombies already took out the bullet factory. Right. I have a lot of people come up to me and they say,

I'll make my own bullets. And I say, sir, with all due respect, no, you don't. You assemble them from the Cabela's catalog. God bless you. But unless you're smelting the bronze. Unless you're removing the iron ore from the earth. Unless you're making that powder like Captain Kirk in that episode. With the gorn.

With the gorn. You're not making your own bullets. I'm sorry. So, Laurie. Laurie, that was quite a list there for how you stop a zombie. Lauren, you're not making your own bullets. I'm sorry. So, Laurie, Laurie, that was quite a list there for how you stop a zombie. How do you stop an outbreak? Well, the first thing you have to do is make sure that everybody whose job it is to treat patients and identify who's sick has proper protection to make sure they don't become carriers of the disease. Medical support personnel. Medical support personnel, ambulance drivers, you name it.

They all need latex gloves, masks, proper equipment. Okay, first line of defense. First line of defense. Then make sure that in the hospitals, all the equipment is sterile and you don't reuse any syringes. A whole lot of epidemics are simply because of reused syringes in poor country hospitals. So the hospital is not the place to get better. Can you sterilize syringes or you just need more? Not modern ones. We now use plastic. If you put that in an autoclave, it'll melt. Okay, so I won't do that. Yeah, not a good idea. So they're made cheap so that you can

reuse them without a great cost. I mean, you can dispose of them without great cost to you. Cost to the environment, but not cost to the individual okay so now so now you've got that and now how about people themselves i mean my great worry is there's a virus that breaks out and you can catch it airborne yeah just by thinking about it that would be the worst fear itself would kill you well fear does kill in an epidemic People behave really stupidly And put themselves at great risk And I've seen it over and over You know in the SARS epidemic I was in Hong Kong

And there were two major hospitals That the bulk of all the patients went to So the start of the SARS was in China Yeah it started in China And was covered up It started in November of 2002 We didn't know about it until about this time, 10 years ago. A government cover-up. Yeah, Chinese government cover-up, because there was a

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

stayed on the ninth floor, and everybody else on the ninth floor that pressed the nine button on the elevator got his disease. They then went. they were travelers, they went to their respective airport destinations and took the virus to Vietnam, to Toronto, Canada, to... This is like the end of the movie Planet of the Apes. This is terrifying. I'm like, how am I still alive even hearing the story? And what I saw was that the case in Vietnam, you would think that would have been where there was a really terrible epidemic because it was a poor country. But actually, they had such bad hospital facilities that the windows were all open and it diluted the virus in the air. So people weren't coughing on each other.

Go to Toronto where they had high tech medicine like we have here in the United States. They had a heck of a time getting rid of that epidemic. Never trust Canadians. It just kept spreading inside their hospital. Because the hospital had a completely contained environment. Yes, and then in China, it was that the people didn't trust healthcare workers. They're right. They were right.

Well, it was a big rip-off system there. And so people would keep their loved ones at home with the virus and not take them in. Okay, so they weren't right. And it spread rapidly. And I went all over China under the radar, though they had put out the word throughout the Communist Party that if anybody spotted dangerous foreigner Laurie Garrett, I was to be arrested. Were you arrested? No, but my translator was. Your translator was arrested?

Yeah, but we managed to get pretty much through most of the SARS area of China and document what was going down. So when we come back to StarTalk, I want to talk about vaccines and the cultural resistance to that that exists presumably in other nations as well, but certainly there's some of that here in the United States. We should talk about polio and Al-Qaeda. We'll go straight there after this break.

You're listening to StarTalk Radio, the zombie edition with zombies analogized to viral outbreaks. We'll be right back. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I got Eugene Merman with me, my co-host. And this is the zombie edition. We're talking about viruses with Laurie Garrett, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who writes about this stuff. Yeah. She's tweets at Lori underscore Garrett.

Yeah. If you want to avoid an outbreak, follow her on Twitter. That's how I do it. That's how I've avoided Ebola. And it's Garrett with two R's and two T's. And she's got a website, LoriGarrett.com. We're also featuring my interview obtained at Comic-Con 2012. And it's Garrett with two R's and two T's. And she's got a website, lauriegarrett.com. We're also featuring my interview obtained at Comic-Con 2012 with Max Brooks, the world's expert on zombies.

I've got a question. If you want to stop a virus, typically we think of vaccinating ourselves in advance of this. In your world travels, has there been resistance to vaccinations? Or is it that new viruses come up and we don't have a vaccine yet? It's both. Obviously with flu, we've never had vaccine on time to make much of a hill of beans of difference. And the majority of the planet never gets flu vaccine because we only manufacture enough for the people in the rich countries. But in most of the world, the resistance to vaccination comes from one of two places either they are from the rich world they are well educated they're upper middle class and they've

come to the conclusion which has absolutely no basis in scientific reality that their babies will have autism because of a vaccine literally that's like a specific fear that people have especially in america yeah yeah no i've heard that yeah it actually all started it started with a guy in the uk named andrew wakefield who claimed to be able to prove this and it turned out to be totally bogus he was as close to disenfranchised as the british royal academy of sciences and the royal society of medicine can do yet it continues to resonate in a certain kind of conspiratorial way. I think it resonates because you do a Google search on vaccines and autism

and up comes all the websites and you think there's something legitimate even though it's all based on the single... One liar, one British liar. One deceptive set of bogus research. Like an evil John Lennon of science. The bigger problem we have right now is, here we were on the cusp of eradicating polio. And the CIA used a vaccine ruse in order to capture Osama bin Laden. So the polio vaccine, is that like smallpox vaccine?

It was an attempt to rid it completely. Completely rid it because there are no animals out there harboring polio so it's possible if we can get rid of it in humans that we can actually eradicate the humans are the only carriers therefore we polio and no wolves with polio sort of no monkeys poorly about so we've been really you know optimistic and the rotary clubs all over the world have raised the money to support this eradication effort well and the gates foundation is that they're in this they're in they're in the game uh the u.s government's in the game etc well i'm going to throw my hat in the game you should it's it's a great idea who wants paralyzed

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

And now Islamists, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda offshoots are slaughtering polio workers in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Yemen. Because they think they're all part of a CIA conspiracy. Exactly. And it's open season. And most of them are female volunteers, unpaid, that are being assassinated. We just had an incident where some Koreans were killed in their sleep in an African country where Islamist, this was in Nigeria, thought they were polio vaccinators. So, we've hit this point where as a matter of social conspiracy theory around protecting us from viruses or your zombies, if you will, as a metaphor, you know, the CIA has actually mucked it up. And we now have Islamists all over the world convinced

that in polio vaccines are something that's bad for Muslims. Okay, so that's bad for Muslims. Okay. Well, that sounds, no, that's crazy. Yeah, well, so again, science literacy matters here, because if you're aware of how biology works, how viruses work, how immunization works, and what it does and why, then you'd be able to distinguish the bad efforts of the CIA from the good efforts of the World Health Organization or anybody else. By the way, we've been here before. This happened with HIV over and over until you had the head of state of South Africa, Or anybody else. all to make profits for these alleged American companies. And because he refused to make those drugs available to South Africans,

360,000 South Africans died of HIV without treatment. In the few moments we have left, what's the status of smallpox? Completely gone. The only samples are stored in two locations. Is one of them Amherst College? One is in Atlanta, Georgia. You can guess what that facility is. And the other is in Russia.

The Center for Disease Control. That's Putin probably. Is this one of these things where they got to come together and destroy them simultaneously? Yes, but they've never agreed to do it. So every time there's a meeting, should we destroy or not destroy, it turns into a brouhaha, a total mess. And everybody leaves the room and says, let's decide next time. We should get Islamists to do it.

So the day we manufacture viruses, then you can destroy that one and anyone wants to make it again later, they just follow some recipe and do it. Can we have a virus that eats smallpox? That's the next stage, which I'm now working on. When we come back, the future of viruses. StarTalk Radio, the zombie edition,

the virus edition as well. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Joining me is co-host Eugene Merman. Yes. Hello. Yes. Viruses.

We're all about viruses. Somehow Eugene is very tickled by all of this. Laurie Garrett, you're a virus journalist extraordinaire. Somehow being everywhere in the world where a virus outbreaks. And we've been analogizing this to zombies because I have interview clips from Max Brooks. If you didn't know, he's actually the son of Mel Brooks, the famous actor. All becomes clear. Writer, director.

Writer, director, comedian, everything. Yeah. And I was in Comic-Con and caught up with him. Let's find out just what he says about zombies and viral outbreaks and cultural responses to it. Check it out. So it seems to me like the CDC should have you on their payroll. Well, the CDC has a wonderful zombie plan, and it's great because— No, I was joking.

You're not joking now. No, I ain't joking. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has a zombie plan and it's great because no i was joking you're not joking now no i ain't joking the center for disease control in atlanta has a zombie plan because for the first time in federal government history they're actually connecting with young people because what they're trying to do is get little kids and teenagers thinking about disaster preparedness but you don't say it in a real plague you say hey kids if there's zombie outbreak, here's what you need in your kit. So it's an education strategy. It's an education strategy. For the first time

you have young people talking about things like bottled water, radios, plans, first aid kits. God bless Dr. Khan over at the CDC. Let's cut his budget by another third. So, Laurie, did you know this about the CDC?

Yes, absolutely. You did know this about it. I would hope. And I'm pleased you do. So, there are people who, getting back to these fear factors, there are people who feel pretty sure that somewhere in some diabolical lab, somebody's cooking up a virus for for for evil nefarious purposes they probably are but that's not really what we should be afraid of well um

actually let me put it to you this way first of all the russians never shut down their entire biological warfare apparatus and under putin the military continues to have something going on and they're not ever allowing any outside investigators to go in. So we don't know the total status of the Russian program. I do. It's probably terrifying. Yeah, well, and – A native Russian right here.

Putin with unlimited money is making biological weapons. Dasvidanya. Probably. Meanwhile, in the United States and, to a lesser degree, other wealthy parts of the world, we have this very exciting revolution going on in biology called synthetic biology, where people are building organisms from the DNA up, or RNA up. She calls it an exciting. Yes. Not terrifying, but exciting.

Okay. There are very positive things that can come from this. Is one of them enslaving the human race well one of the things is that groups are now saying well why can't we figure out what an epidemic would look like by making the very organisms that would create the worst case epidemics and let's study them in the lab exactly like the end of the world scenario beginning of every movie the next stage is now you build the sequence you send it to somebody's computer thousands of miles away theoretically and they print it out in a 3d printer that's loaded with nucleotides so now

you can make microorganisms you can fax an organism to somebody essentially and that is an example of the deadliest organism to see what an outbreak. So you're emailing deadly viruses to just see what happens. Not computer viruses, the instructions on how to make a virus that you just invented. Right. So now all of a sudden we're no longer in the world where Biological Weapons Convention or any other initial agreement is about, or the FBI for that matter, is about monitoring who has test tubes with what in it. But rather who just emailed a sequence to somebody. You're never going to be able to monitor that. How are you going to monitor that?

Exactly. Right. Great. So we're in a whole new world. Thanks for messing with our day here. We were all happy before you started talking. So you could send to someone a thing that they would print, and then it would just eat them.

You could fax someone a wolf now. Just to give you a simple analogy, you could fax a wolf that would eat a person. And the person would say, gee, I wonder what this nucleotide sequence is. Let me try it. Exactly. And then out of the lab comes a monster.

Yeah. Well, let's just say that we've already seen somebody, a group, make from the DNA up the poliovirus. Oh. And we've seen some deliberate manipulation of viruses to give them the capacity to spread between mammals that they didn't have before. Great. This all sounds great. So a new set of legs, some other kind of motorized. What's the biggest thing that someone's made, like a cat, a squirrel?

No, nothing that big, but we don't want big. The problem is the very small, that which you cannot see. And so CDC is thinking about some of this. Any other agencies out there? Well, WHO, FBI, CIA, National Security Council. AARP. We're in the middle of all of this. So wait a minute.

At the Council on Foreign Relations, we're working on this problem. Every agency has its own motivations. If the military is doing this, it's not for the same reasons that the World Health Organization are doing it, I presume. Actually, everybody's very worried about counterinsurgency. We'll get back to that in our final segment coming up, the special zombie edition of StarTalk Radio, special zombie edition,

where we're talking about zombies and viruses and all the stuff that can kill you in ways that you don't want. And I've got Laurie Garrett with Eugene Merman, of course. But Laurie, you're an expert in this. You're a journalist, Pulitzer Prize winning. You had a book come out last year, I Heard the Sirens Scream, how America responded to 9-11 and the anthrax threat. We probably did not respond well. And I'm betting that's not the first time we responded badly.

Oh my God. When was that? The's not the first time we responded badly. Oh, my God. When was that? The worst of all was our response to HIV. Total disaster. 30 years ago. 30 years ago, total disaster. What was the main problem? The main problem was that the victims, quote unquote, of the virus were gay men and IV drug users.

It became politicized. The president at the time was Ronald Reagan. He refused to even mention the epidemic. And so now, depending on who you are as a demographic in a population, if you don't have a government that thinks about you in a caring, loving way, that could be your death song. The biggest lesson from tuberculosis, HIV, go down the list, is you don't want to be part of a disenfranchised group

or a group that the larger society looks down upon because if you are if you are that individual society will not be there for you so tuberculosis you're probably referring to the immigrant period back you know 110 we now we now have a xdr tuberculosis extremely drug resistant your chances of surviving if you get infected with it are extremely low well guess what it's spreading in africa it's spreading in prison populations in russia it's disenfranchised disenfranchised well so this stuff affects all cultures civilization society it's not just a simple outbreak containable where everybody might get it exactly all right so my interview with max brooks he kind of brings this to a closure,

whereas we talk about zombies as an analog to disease. Let's see what he's got to say. For me, it's about coming together, not splitting apart. And I think the problem is with a lot of zombie fans is they want a zombie outbreak to happen because they want to be the individual, the alpha male society by themselves. No government. The hero. They want to be the hero. And the problem, society by themselves, no government. The hero. They want to be the hero.

And the problem is that hero has a life expectancy of 30. They don't realize how complicated society is. This civilization, this thing we've created, how many threads it takes to keep this tapestry together. You know, at a time when everyone is saying less government, I think anyone who says that should go spend a year in Somalia. See what it's like when there's really less government, I think anyone who says that should go spend a year in Somalia. See what it's like when there's really less government. And if the water shuts off, if the food is not delivered to your grocer, do you know how to skin a deer? Do you know how to eat a

squirrel? We don't have any of those talents. No, and every level builds on itself. I mean, how many of us are alive today because of medication or surgery or any of the modern wonders that keep so much of us alive. And if you pull that plug, a lot of us are doomed. So a subtext there is to perhaps get people to appreciate the very existence of the civilization in which they live? I would be very proud if people did that, because I do think that most people nowadays, especially in this country, not only take civilization for granted, they're trying to unravel it. And I think that is really dangerous. I've traveled around the world, and I've seen what happens when countries don't have this level of civilization. Do you know there's a new department

of Homeland Security that's specifically charged with a disaster on the scale that takes out infrastructure? So an asteroid. So where transportation is halted, clean water is not available, medical supplies are not available. How do you recover from that? Right. Which I think is brilliant. I mean, I tell people in some of my zombie lectures, I say, I actually do these lectures. I say, you know that we are now less likely to survive a quarantine than we were in 1917. Because in 1917, you go to your local food store, everything was either canned or salted or pickled. Now, everything in your grocery store is based on same-day fresh delivery.

What's going to happen when those trucks don't roll in at 6 a.m.? You run out of food in four days. Yeah, four days. As opposed to 1917, you might have a couple weeks. Especially the salting of food was very big. We did a whole show on salt. Right. Just in how that was so fundamental. Right. And where does this all come from? How do

you clean water? What happens when the water treatment shuts down? I mean, think about it today. What would happen today if Saudi Arabia got nuked by Iran, and we were not involved? What would happen to the price of fuel? What would happen to our society that runs on this single product? There it is, Lori, I want to know, you think about this stuff, you write about it. What is the future of viruses? Where do we have to be afraid of next? Yes. Wherever climate change and habitat intrusion is occurring as a nexus, we see species put

under tremendous pressure that carry viruses that humans have not been exposed to. Almost all of the big epidemics that we've seen in the last decade plus have come from fruit bats that normally- Bats? Did you say bats? B-A-T-S that normally- These are the big ones, the fruit bats. Yes. They normally pollinate the rainforests. And as the rainforests are under stress and the upper canopies are getting overheated, desperate bat populations are moving closer and closer into human areas and passing their viruses to our livestock and eventually to us. And guess what that includes?

SARS. Ebola turns out to be a bat virus. Marburg turns out to be. But also sexy vampires. Leave out the sexy vampires. It's not great. Brad Pitt as a viral transmitter. A bat bit him and made him so handsome.

So basically. You're just jealous. The environment is creating whole other vectors for disease transmission. Absolutely. And we're unable to really predict or quantify the risk. We're going to have to have you back on StarTalk because this was fascinating, and my whole mind and body is in a new place

for having listened. It's been two hours of StarTalk. And with Laurie, on our last of those two hours, thanks for joining us. Thank you. And Eugene, thanks for tweeting at Eugene Merman. It's true. I got you there.

This has been StarTalk Radio. Based in part on a grant from the National Science Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Signing off, as usual, by bidding you to keep looking up.