875: Jonathan Kennedy | How Pathogens Have Shaped Our World

875: Jonathan Kennedy | How Pathogens Have Shaped Our World

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[00:00:24] Jonathan Kennedy: If we were to take all the bacteria on our planet and weigh them, their mass would be about 1,000 times more than all the humans. So despite the fact that these things are so small they're invisible to the naked eye, there's so many of them that they weigh 1,000 times all the humans.

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[00:01:33] By the way, shout out to Fareed for his feedback on the show intro recently. They were getting a bit long, I admit it, but we trimmed it all a little bit. How you like me now?

[00:01:39] Today on the show, the modern world has been shaped by microbes as much as it has been shaped by the men and women who inhabit it. My guest today, Jonathan Kennedy and I will discuss human history in terms of pathogens and diseases and the way that diseases and epidemics have shaped society and civilization. Plagues essentially have made a lot of big moves in civilization and made us turn in some pretty stark directions. We're going to explore all that today.

[00:02:05] If you're a fan of books like Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, or you love history and science or the combination of history and science, I think you're going to dig this episode. Here we go with Jonathan Kennedy.

[00:02:19] I got interested in this because while there are tons of history books, I think few focus on how diseases, especially pandemics, have driven human history. And so that's a unique angle that I think you took with this.

[00:02:32] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. And I think, you know, my background's in history and sociology. And I guess, you know, a couple of years ago, I came to the realization that in many ways, we're still very much stuck in the age of the Old Testament if you go back to your Genesis where God supposedly created humans in his own image and then gave us dominion over the land, the sea, and all the animals in it. And we still seem to think very much about the world in that way. We see the world as a stage on which humans, whether that's great men and women, or classes that are struggling, play out our roles. And we see the natural world as just a blank canvas.

[00:03:11] But actually, you know, like the more I read about science and the science of diseases and pathogens and microbes, I realized that the world isn't a stage, the natural world isn't the stage. We live in a system, an ecosystem. And we're relatively small, small part of that. And you can measure the importance of microbes or pathogens in many, many different ways. And I can just throw out a few factoids that I think—

[00:03:37] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:03:37] Jonathan Kennedy: —might blow your list as mines to start with because they certainly did for me when I was researching the book. One is that if we were to take all the bacteria on our planet and weigh them, their mass would be about 1,000 times more than all the humans. So despite the fact that these things are so small, they're invisible to the naked eye, there's so many of them that they weigh a thousand times all the humans.

[00:04:02] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:04:02] Jonathan Kennedy: And another crazy fact relates to viruses, which tend to be even, even smaller. If we were to take all the viruses on the planet and put them end to end, according to an article in Nature Microbiology, they would reach for something like a hundred million light years, which is—

[00:04:22] Jordan Harbinger: What? Wow.

[00:04:23] Jonathan Kennedy: It's just a mind boggling figure, but I guess the research that really got me into this was not about the numbers. It was about the actual impact that these microbes have on our bodies. And, you know, we can look at the impact of viruses say on human evolution, which again is really, really, really surprising. I think your listeners might be shocked by it. So there are a particular type of virus called retroviruses.

[00:04:50] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:52] Jonathan Kennedy: And they reproduce by basically inserting a copy of their DNA into our DNA. When they infect the cells, our reproductive cells, so either our sperm cells or egg cells, something really remarkable happens, basically, the DNA from the virus gets passed down to our children and our children's children and so on.

[00:05:15] Jordan Harbinger: That's kind of gross actually but go ahead continue. That's gross. That skeeves me out a little bit, man.

[00:05:21] Jonathan Kennedy: It gets grosser.

[00:05:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I bet.

[00:05:24] Jonathan Kennedy: So about eight percent of all the DNA in our genome comes from these viral infections—

[00:05:30] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[00:05:30] Jonathan Kennedy: —which is surprising but then we, humans, seem to have acquired functions from these viruses that are really important to human existence. So one example is the ability to form memories. So the way in which kind of information passes between brain cells—

[00:05:48] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:48] Jonathan Kennedy: —it's very similar to the way that the viruses pass their DNA from one cell to another. And when scientists looked at the gene that codes for this in humans, they found that it was inherited from a viral infection that occurred maybe 400 million years ago.

[00:06:02] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. What? So we have memory because an early ancestor of human of Homo sapiens got a virus.

[00:06:10] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

[00:06:11] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:06:11] Jonathan Kennedy: And scientists have managed to breed, I think mice, mice or rats without this particular gene. And these rodents aren't able to learn things and don't seem to be able to remember things. So it's really kind of mind boggling. But my favorite one is probably the ability to have children through kind of live birth also seems to have been at least in part made possible by one of these retrovirus infections that occurred something like 180 million years ago.

[00:06:41] So the substance that binds the placenta to the uterus in the female body is very, very similar to the substance that viruses use when they're trying to enter a cell without being detected by the immune system. And this might sound surprising, but actually it shouldn't be because the placenta is really a remarkable organ because it allows basically a genetically distinct object to form a bond with the host and in most situations in nature, if something tried to do that, it would be destroyed by the immune system.

[00:07:14] Jordan Harbinger: Right, the parasitic relationship.

[00:07:16] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But because our bodies have copied or have borrowed this technology, I guess it's kind of prehistoric biohacking in a way—

[00:07:23] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:07:24] Jonathan Kennedy: —from viruses, they're able to overcome that problem. And, you know, kind of being able to carry your young in your womb for nine months is a real evolutionary advantage, right? It's much safer than laying some eggs somewhere and then maybe running away when a lion comes and rolls at you or something. So, yeah, really, really, really, really mad.

[00:07:43] Jordan Harbinger: Let me get this straight. So basically, if humanity hadn't been infected with this retrovirus, so in early ancestor of humanity, humans would reproduce by laying eggs as well.

[00:07:53] Jonathan Kennedy: Yes. So if a shrew like animal hadn't been infected by this virus about 180 billion years ago, we would be laying eggs or we would be born from eggs—

[00:08:01] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:08:01] Jonathan Kennedy: —which is, it's hard to get your mind round.

[00:08:04] Jordan Harbinger: It is. We're not talking about like a humanoid type of thing. We're talking about an early mammal, basically.

[00:08:09] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, it's a long, a long time ago.

[00:08:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:08:12] Jonathan Kennedy: This is the beginning of mammals really, but we don't have to go back—

[00:08:15] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:08:15] Jonathan Kennedy: —all this far. I think another. bit of research. Another study that really encouraged me to look at the impact of infectious diseases on society was by some Belgian scientists. And basically what they did was they took the feces of 2000 Belgian people, rather them than me. And they looked through it and they tried to sequence the DNA of all the bacteria in the feces and they found some pretty remarkable things.

[00:08:44] First of all, they discovered basically that the bacteria in our gut or something like 90 percent of the bacteria in our gut is capable of producing neurotransmitters. So, chemical messengers like dopamine, serotonin that are capable of influencing human moods. And this kind of really raises the question why.

[00:09:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:09:05] Jonathan Kennedy: It seems like over millions of years, these bacteria have evolved to communicate with us because perhaps they realize that if we're more gregarious, if we're happier, we're going to go out, we're going to socialize and we'll provide opportunities for these bacteria to colonize another body.

[00:09:23] Jordan Harbinger: I'm trying to think about how that might happen. Like, hey, let's make him happy so he goes to this party...your poop gets into somebody else's body. It's like, what, what kind of parties were they having back then that allowed that to happen?

[00:09:35] Jonathan Kennedy: That was the days before germ theory, so people weren't washing their hands and—

[00:09:39] Jordan Harbinger: Right, right. Now, that all, unfortunately, makes too much sense. Yeah, that's really, really gross.

[00:09:45] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:09:45] Jordan Harbinger: Imagine that research study though, man. How did this Barbie doll head get in here? I don't know. There's a lot of filtering through feces. That's an unfortunate position as a research student, as a PhD student. Like you're going to be spending the next three years digging through other people's poop, but it'll be interesting. We promise.

[00:10:02] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, that's not for me. I guess, they got their rewards in the end. They got an article, I can't remember if it was nature or science, but yeah, it's a pretty sh*tty way to do it.

[00:10:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I see what you did there.

[00:10:13] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. Excuse the pun. But what was really interesting as well with this study was that they basically found people in the sample that had been diagnosed with clinical depression were lacking in a couple of types of bacteria. And these bacteria were capable of producing neurotransmitters like dopamine.

[00:10:31] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[00:10:32] Jonathan Kennedy: So again, it's really fascinating because it makes you wonder perhaps in the future therapy or Prozac won't be the best way to treat—

[00:10:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:10:42] Jonathan Kennedy: —clinical depression, perhaps having some kind of fecal transplant will be even better. I mean, just whole study, and there's loads of stuff. I'm sure you've had guests on talking about the microbiome and the fact that there are more bacteria in our bodies than there are human cells.

[00:10:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I guess you're right. It's only a matter of time till you're not taking the pill orally, but you're putting it in your backside and hopefully, that's all it is. And then, it's colonizing your gut with something. Because I'd wager most of the things you take orally just never make it that far. Because of stomach acid and other digestive processes.

[00:11:18] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, exactly. They just get kind of destroyed on the way through.

[00:11:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:22] Jonathan Kennedy: This got me thinking if bacteria and viruses have such a big impact on our bodies, on us as individuals, what kind of influence do they have on, you know, kind of aggregations of bodies on society, on history, on economics, on politics. So all this research about pathogens and microbes, it's really kind of got me thinking about history and society in a totally new way. And I guess, it was also, you know, the fact that we were living through a pandemic at the time—

[00:11:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:53] Jonathan Kennedy: —which got me wondering about that as well.

[00:11:54] Jordan Harbinger: Is pathogenesis a real word or is it just a catchy portmanteau of pathogen and genesis?

[00:11:59] Jonathan Kennedy: I mean, my background isn't in medicine, but I found myself teaching in a medical school, teaching public policy and public health. And certainly people in the medical school study pathogenesis, so that's, you know, this is going to test my Greek, but patho is kind of disease and genesis is the creation. So pathogenesis is basically kind of looking at the way in which diseases develop usually in cells or in the body. But I guess kind of, it's a play on words, the title of the book, in the sense that I look at the way in which diseases kind of create new societies or new opportunities for different exciting ideas to emerge out of the chaos that they create.

[00:12:44] Jordan Harbinger: The black plague and other pathogens have killed so many people. And you mentioned that those who survived had genes that gave them a stronger immune response or boost when faced with this pathogen. So it almost seems like this whole hubbub about, like, alpha males, natural selection, eat or be eaten or whatever, it seems like actually it comes down to immunity instead of being a tough guy, at least at the macro scale.

[00:13:10] Jonathan Kennedy: Now, that's a funny thing because, yeah, we think about this kind of Darwinian idea of survival of the fittest—

[00:13:15] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:17] Jonathan Kennedy: —as being able to fight other men or being able to fight off other alpha or other apex predators, you know, your lions or your, or your tigers or whatever, but when you actually look at what have been the biggest causes of death, certainly over the last kind of 10,000 years since the transition to agriculture, it's been infectious diseases. And so the capacity to survive infectious diseases is kind of really a massive survival advantage. And I guess the kind of weird thing with that as well is that although often we can have genes that confer a survival advantage on us in the face of infectious diseases, frequently these genes actually interfere with the normal functioning of the body.

[00:14:00] So the classic example here is with sickle cell anemia—

[00:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:14:04] Jonathan Kennedy: —which is really effective in places where malaria is endemic at stopping the plasmodium kind of making you really sick. But the kind of downside of that is that it creates all sorts of complications in your that kind of really create debilitating pain and really, really unfortunate. And this is just the kind of worst and most famous example, but this happens in multiple other cases with other infectious diseases that a successful immune response also kind of leads to some other negative aspect in the human body. Although we're fit to fight diseases, in many ways, we're less kind of well-functioning human beings.

[00:14:46] Jordan Harbinger: If the bacteria and viruses are able to transmit or transfer DNA to humans, were they able to do that with each other as well? Can bacteria and viruses either interspecies or within their own species, can they transfer that DNA? Basically, how do they get it?

[00:15:03] Jonathan Kennedy: Bacteria are really kind of remarkable because certainly they're able to engage in kind of a horizontal transfer of genes between species. So again, this is a kind of a form of biohacking in nature and again, something that really shows you the limitations of the Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection that one strain of bacteria can immediately acquire certain genes that provide it with advantages.

[00:15:30] And I think the interesting thing about this is that it helps us to understand why antimicrobial resistance is such a big problem, right?

[00:15:39] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:41] Jonathan Kennedy: We have been for ever since we've been on the planet in this battle with bacteria and they're inside us and all around us. And many strains of bacteria are evolving in ways that harm us. But they have kind of a variety of advantages. One, they reproduce much quicker than us.

[00:15:58] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:59] Jonathan Kennedy: And two, they're able to horizontally transfer genes between species, which makes it a, it makes it a pretty unfair fight in some respects.

[00:16:07] Jordan Harbinger: When you say horizontally transfer DNA, do you mean that—? Let's make like a human analogy. If I'm a bacterium and I'm in the room with a bunch of other bacteria, can I say the equivalent of, "Wow, it's amazing. You're not killed by UV. I kind of want that special power. Can you give that to me?" And then, I get injected with that. And I'm like, "Thanks, bro." Is that the dumb bro version of how this happens or is it more generational?

[00:16:32] Jonathan Kennedy: I think that's pretty accurate. Ed Yong, who the brilliant science writer, he kind of describes it as being as easy as exchanging phone numbers. So I think your analogy is pretty spot on.

[00:16:41] Jordan Harbinger: I'm shocked that I got that even remotely close because it sounded stupid before I said it and definitely sounded stupid after. That's incredible because they can almost sort of naturally select in real time, right? "Oh, there's chemicals here that are not good for me. Oh, you don't seem to be affected by this. Give me that." It's like handing out gas masks in a room where there's a toxic gas or handing out sun shades because there's UV but all almost in real time. Because the bacteria, what do they, live a few hours or days or whatever a lot of the time. So, that's an amazing ability that is shockingly sophisticated for something that is so tiny and so basic and millions or hundreds of millions of years old. That's incredible.

[00:17:26] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, it's totally incredible, as you say.

[00:17:29] Jordan Harbinger: What is the poison-antidote model? I have a note, well, first of all, I've got a note here and I don't know how to ask the question. I just wrote poison-antidote model, but I have no idea how to lead into this.

[00:17:39] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, it's a really interesting concept. I guess the closest thing to, um, the horizontal transfer of genes in humanity is kind of when we look back at the interrelation between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals 100,000, 50,000 years ago, and some of your listeners will know that humans have certainly something like two percent of their genes comes from Neanderthals, at least if we're of European or Asian origin, Native Americans as well. People of African origin have significantly less, but still some. And we've known this since about 2010 when Svante Pääbo, who won the Nobel prize for medicine last year, managed to basically kind of work out the genome of Neanderthals and found that actually we were pretty closely related to Neanderthals.

[00:18:30] Jordan Harbinger: Surprise, surprise.

[00:18:31] Jonathan Kennedy: And we shared lots of genes with them. But the thing to remember is this two percent of genes, they're not randomly selected genes. They're ones that provided our distant ancestors with a survival advantage as we were pushing out of Africa between 150,000 years ago. So we would have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years in tropical Africa and would be used to that kind of climate and that disease environment. And as we were pushing up through the Middle East into Northern Eurasia, it was cold, it was dark, but also we were coming across different infectious diseases. And infectious diseases that were carried by other species of humans like Neanderthals, which had evolved in Europe and in other parts of Eurasia.

[00:19:16] And I guess kind of the thing to remember is when we first came into contact with Neanderthals after perhaps our ancestors being separated for half a million years, you know, it was probably really devastating. We were coming across new infectious diseases that we had no immunity to and the same for the Neanderthals. And so probably, in the first interactions, we would have met. We don't know what happened. We know that some of our ancestors had sex because we can still see the artifacts of those trysts in our DNA. But it's also very likely that we got sick and a lot of people got very, very ill or died. And it doesn't seem like we kind of evolved through natural selection, better immunity. We just acquired wholesale these genes from Neanderthals.

[00:20:07] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting. Oh, I see.

[00:20:09] Jonathan Kennedy: So this is the poison-antidote model.

[00:20:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:20:12] Jonathan Kennedy: The Neanderthals give us the poison in the sense that they have these infectious diseases that are making us really ill. But they also provide us with the antidotes in the sense of the genes that they've evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. So again, it's like a another prehistoric form of biohacking—

[00:20:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:20:29] Jonathan Kennedy: —where we take wholesale these genes.

[00:20:32] Jordan Harbinger: So somebody took one for the team and in a big sort of immunity boosting way for the rest of humanity.

[00:20:37] Jonathan Kennedy: Yes. Several people in the industry.

[00:20:39] Jordan Harbinger: Several million possibly, yeah.

[00:20:41] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:20:41] Jordan Harbinger: Doing this.

[00:20:42] So, okay, if humans and Neanderthals shared these immune defense plans or so to speak, along with the actual diseases, why did humans or Homo sapiens, I probably should use the actual term here. Why did Homo sapiens prevail? Is it because we're smarter? Is it because we had language? Is it because we had better social structures? Because it seems like they had better immunity or did they just have different immunity?

[00:21:02] Jonathan Kennedy: They had different immunity. So we were trying to push into a new disease environment and they were suited to that and we weren't. But yeah, it's a really interesting question. Why did Homo sapiens survive and Neanderthals disappear? And the traditional argument is that we were smarter than them. And, you know, this argument is even inherent in the name that we give ourselves, right? We call ourselves Homo sapiens, wise man, wise humans. And in fact, there was a zoologist in the 19th century, just after Neanderthals had been discovered, who suggested calling them Homo stupidus, so stupid humans, to distinguish between the wise and the stupid species of humans.

[00:21:38] But the more that we learn about Neanderthals, the more that we realize that they weren't these kind of brutish cavemen, and there's been some really fascinating archaeological discoveries in the last few decades. So we know now that Neanderthals buried their dead. They might've even buried their dead by putting flowers on top of the graves. There seems to be some evidence of that, although that's questionable. We know that they looked after their sick because kind of evidence of Neanderthals that were really badly injured in childhoods who survived for decades have been found. We know they were capable of traveling by boats in the Eastern Mediterranean. That they used medicinal herbs to treat various maladies. We know that they talked, they used fire, they painted cave walls, not as beautifully as some of the cave paintings, that occurred a bit later, like Lascaux, but still, they were interested in these aesthetic concerns.

[00:22:38] Jordan Harbinger: I'm shocked they made boats, I hadn't heard that. I had no idea about that. That's really interesting. Incredible, actually.

[00:22:44] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. So basically anthropologists, archaeologists have found evidence of Neanderthals in islands, certainly around Greece that were islands kind of 50,000, 100,000, 150,000 years ago. So there was no other way that the Neanderthals could have got from kind of landmass of the old world to these islands without going by boat. So yeah, really amazing. And it kind of builds up this picture of a species that isn't that different to us.

[00:23:11] So yeah, kind of the question is why did we survive and they didn't. The answer is pretty simple, really. We, or Homo sapiens had been living in tropical Africa. And if we go back to our kind of basic physics, biology, if you're closer to the equator, more sun hits the earth. So you tend to have more vegetation, more animals living on that vegetation and more microbes living on the vegetation and the animals. So Homo sapiens, when they were pushing out of Africa, they carried more and more deadly infectious diseases. And so we overcame the disease burden of Neanderthals quicker than they overcame ours. And so we were able to kind of basically push through into Eurasia with immunity and spread throughout the world pretty quickly.

[00:23:58] Jordan Harbinger: Now, the agricultural revolution. We, humanity, Homo sapiens, switch from — sorry, this is going to remain clunky, folks, because I should probably use these technical terms here, you know, these scientific terms just to avoid confusion, but the Homo sapiens switch from hunting and gathering to essentially agriculture and farming. What does this do for diseases and why?

[00:24:20] Jonathan Kennedy: You know, this is a really important development in the emergence of infectious diseases because you know, for the first time in history, humans are living in close proximity to one another, but also in really close proximity to animals, both farm animals and also the kind of parasites that live on those animals and the various kind of rodents and things that are attracted to grain.

[00:24:44] So all of a sudden you have kind of these Jim Scott, the Yale-based anthropologist, refers to them as multi-species resettlement sites. So basically, all of a sudden, humans are living cheek by jowl with animals of various sorts, which creates new opportunities for infectious diseases, zoonotic diseases to jump from one species to the other, and we're also living close to one another, and we're trading with people in far flung destinations. So this creates the ability for these diseases, once they've jumped the species barrier, to spread quickly through the village and then spread along trade routes. And this is when you get the emergence of infectious diseases as we now know them.

[00:25:25] So I think it's really interesting to think that, you know, we certainly wouldn't be here chatting on Skype or Zoom if this kind of transition from hunter gathering to settled agriculture hadn't have happened. In some respects, we can argue that it's a good thing because it's brought us civilization or whatever we think of as civilization. But we should also remember there's a kind of dark side to this as well. And that's the emergence of infectious diseases, this kind of real golden age for microbes. Whether you look at the genetic data or you look at kind of art history, it's clear that many of the infectious diseases that have really devastated humanity for the last few thousand years emerged in the wake of this transition to agriculture. So things like the plague, smallpox, polio, they all seem to have emerged after the transition to agriculture.

[00:26:18] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, it all makes sense, right? Instead of just walking around and setting up camp and picking berries and hunting the occasional animal with your small tribe, now, you're living in a small town or whatever a city was at that time, a few thousand people and you're living with, I don't know, what do they domesticate early? Pigs and things like that?

[00:26:38] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:26:38] Jordan Harbinger: And then you've got rats and then you've got fecal matter on the ground from humans and animals that the rats are getting into and then they're biting you when you sleep. I mean, that all just seems like a giant cesspool, petri dish of new diseases that humans had never seen.

[00:26:52] Jonathan Kennedy: No, no, exactly. And I guess like the scary thing is we can also make a comparison to today, right?

[00:26:58] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:26:58] Jonathan Kennedy: But yeah, I think we're living in a new, a new kind of golden age for infectious diseases now, right? You know, I think probably before COVID a lot of us wanted to ignore this fact, but the unprecedented size of the world's population, the fact that we live so closely together that we're encroaching on animal habitats, just the industrial scale of factory farming, not to mention the fact that we can travel so quickly between—

[00:27:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:27:22] Jonathan Kennedy: —you know, really distant parts of the world. This creates the perfect conditions for new pandemics to emerge and to spread really quickly. So it's interesting to see that we're in almost kind of, yeah, the golden age for infectious diseases 2.0, and to look at the parallels between the kind of transition to agriculture and then, you know, whatever we're living in now, the post-industrial age.

[00:27:46] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Jonathan Kennedy. We'll be right back.

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[00:29:54] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks, it's all about my network. I don't like the word networking. I think it's kind of gross. I've got a course on networking, for lack of a better word, over at jordanharbinger.com/course. But it's not cringy. It's not schmoozy. It's down to earth. It's not going to make you feel weird when you do it. It's not going to make you look bad. And many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us, you'll be in smart company where you belong. And there's a happiness dividend with reaching out to people and creating new connections. Find the course again for free at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[00:30:26] Now back to Jonathan Kennedy.

[00:30:30] It is a vulnerable feeling. And you're right, I was going to mention that you could go on a trip to the Amazon jungle for two weeks. I did that a few years ago and end up in the middle of absolutely nowhere, sleeping at a far-flung science research station. And the longest part of the journey is the boat ride and the bus ride to through the jungle. The plane ride is shorter, right? And that's kind of scary because that means you've gone really damn far into the middle of areas where there aren't even really humans other than uncontacted tribes that are staying well away from this. And you're getting bit by sand flies.

[00:31:04] There was a guy on our trip, I've said this on the show before, I'll keep it short. There was a guy on our trip that got Leishmaniasis on his face, which is a flesh-eating bacteria. And it's gross. At least, we knew what it was. But there's probably other stuff out there that we are not quite sure what it is. And some unlucky tour guide or tourist or whatever is going to end up with it at some point.

[00:31:25] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. No, it's nasty to think about, but I guess kind of counterintuitively, or maybe not counterintuitively, but I think we have to worry about that, but also the size of farms and the people that kind of work in farms and the opportunities that that creates for diseases to jump from one species to our own. It's pretty, pretty freaky, too. But scientists have calculated, something like there's a two to three percent chance of a COVID-strain pandemic happening every year, which, you know, it sounds okay if you take it year by year. But when you kind of think cumulatively that in 25 years time, there's a kind of 50/50 chance of another massive pandemic occurring. It's pretty sobering.

[00:32:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, especially since a lot of people like my age are going to be the age that people died when they got COVID or slightly younger. And this could be a worse pandemic. So it's like, oh man, maybe we're going to end up with something way worse when I'm in a much more vulnerable position in terms of my immunity, not super comforting at all. Also looking at our reaction, it's a little scary because 25 years sounds like a long time, but are things really going to get that much better? I don't know. I'm not sure.

[00:32:33] Jonathan Kennedy: I guess the thing to remember is we're in a better position than we ever have been. COVID was terrible and it killed millions of people and caused just almost unimaginable disruption, but it was really remarkable, almost miraculous how scientists got together—

[00:32:46] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:47] Jonathan Kennedy: —shared information about the disease, created several effective vaccines within a year and rolled it out really, really, really, really quickly. And so, you know, certainly enormous amounts of money are being put into medical research. Some of the things that they will be capable of doing in 25 years are going to be, you know, beyond our imagination now. So we can perhaps be a little bit. If not confident, there's reasons to be hopeful as well.

[00:33:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, indeed. I'm trying to be more of an optimist, but yeah, it's just scary that you can have a pandemic and then, oh, we're probably going to have another one because our parents didn't really have to deal with that at all, right? I mean, the last big one was flu was, what, 1918, spanish flu?

[00:33:27] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. Well, I think the thing is that antibiotics and vaccines, you know, they created a really exceptional period of time in the second half of the 20th century and the first couple of decades of the 21st that kind of bought us this kind of really, really incredible reprieve in the age old battle against infectious diseases that maybe lulled us into a full sense of security.

[00:33:49] Jordan Harbinger: I think so.

[00:33:50] Jonathan Kennedy: But yeah, certainly our parents were really incredibly lucky in many ways but—

[00:33:53] Jordan Harbinger: Indeed.

[00:33:54] Jonathan Kennedy: —medicine was another, another reason to be happy.

[00:33:56] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned in the book that many more child skeletons were found after humans settled and that that tells us that there were more diseases that affected us in childhood. I'm sure they've controlled for this, but I'm curious how. Is that really because of disease or is that because we can simply find those skeletons because they're in ancient settlements? It seems like if your hunt are gathering and your child dies in the middle of the Eurasian steppe and you bury them in a shallow grave because you're moving along, like we're just never going to find those. So is it kind of like a selection bias, sampling bias in a way?

[00:34:27] Jonathan Kennedy: That's a great question and thinking back to the study, what the scientists show is that It seems like for about 500 to 1,000 years after the transition to agriculture, more or less anywhere in the world, you see a boom in population. The numbers of people living seem to expand massively. And then after about 500 to 1,000 years, you seem to have the emergence of infectious diseases. So they've measured this by showing that you have a kind of a really distinct increase in the number of children and adolescents in cemeteries after about 500 years—

[00:35:04] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:05] Jonathan Kennedy: —from the transition to agriculture. So, of course, when you're looking in the distant past, it's really hard to be certain and you're piecing together—

[00:35:12] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:12] Jonathan Kennedy: —different bits of evidence, but obviously, there's an element of guesswork, but that study seems pretty robust to me. We could just take an example. A couple of weeks ago in the UK, scientists managed to find the oldest evidence of plague ever. So this was in Somerset in the south of England and in Cumbria in the north. And this was basically kind of 4,000 years ago. So almost exactly a thousand years after the transition to agriculture. So yeah, you seem to see this kind of more or less everywhere that you look this kind of increase in mortality due to infectious diseases, basically infectious diseases becoming endemic, right? Because the adult population have either died in childhood or developed resistance. And so it's the young people who are dying.

[00:36:02] Jordan Harbinger: I'm just never going to assume that I thought of something after reading three lines in a book that the scientist who did the entire study that hadn't occurred to this world-renowned expert on this particular thing. I'm just always curious how they control for that sort of thing when it's almost like, what's that fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc, right? Like the correlation versus causation or like sampling bias just seems like a really low-hanging fruit. Like, oh, we're finding all these skeletons in ancient settlements that have cemeteries and we're not finding them in places that, check notes, don't have cemeteries. Okay, well, duh, that makes sense.

[00:36:38] Jonathan Kennedy: You're right to raise these questions, but I really must say having written this book that really tries to summarize and bring together a massive amount of information and a massive amount of evidence from all these different academic disciplines, kind of archaeology, genetics, and things, you know, it's really incredible how much these researchers can tell from just a few clues and how they can kind of make these logical inferences. It's really impressive. They're almost like alchemists.

[00:37:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:37:10] Jonathan Kennedy: They can kind of turn a few fragments of bone into kind of this wonderful new knowledge. It's really incredible.

[00:37:16] Jordan Harbinger: It is. It's like Sherlock Holmes, right? Like, "Look at this fragment of bone. This is from a femur. And you can tell that this person had some sort of neurodegenerative disease because this length would have been longer in a normal person of this age, therefore, they must have had this type of disease and it looks like they were this age, so that must have been this particular one." It's just really, it's like watching Sherlock Holmes but with with actual science. It's really incredible. That's why I love books like this and really love science like this.

[00:37:45] And in the book, you mentioned a lot about the Neolithic farmers bringing disease to hunter gatherers. And there's really fascinating evidence for how these populations spread. One really cool example for the language nerd in me, which was that Farsi, so Persian and European and other languages. All have similar words for wagon and wheel, and I don't know, like, other vehicle parts, suggesting that the migration of those populations happened after wheeled vehicles were invented. And I don't know why that's so damn fascinating, but it really, really is, because just to know that these languages that you think probably have almost nothing in common, it's like, well, actually, they're all from the same ancestor language. And look, the word for wheel is so close, you can tell right away that this was at one point, the same population of people.

[00:38:35] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, I love reading about that stuff as well. And I guess kind of there's been a mystery ever since people realized the connection between English and Greek and Russian and languages like Hindi or Sanskrit—

[00:38:47] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:47] Jonathan Kennedy: That was from the same language group, you know, kind of why is this and what's the origin of this? And there's this assumption that, what we call Proto-Indo European started off being spoken by a small, a small group of people somewhere in the world or somewhere in Eurasia. And then at some point in history, they spread to Europe and they spread to Central Asia and even to South Asia and brought their languages, their language with them. And then, gradually over time, um, these languages became more and more different and basically evolved into the tongues that people that speak today.

[00:39:19] It's only the last few years that scientists have really understood what the actual source of Indo-European languages is, it seems to have happened about kind of 5,000 years ago when you have this massive movement of people from the steppe. So the kind of the vast grasslands of beyond kind of Europe, in Southern Russia, above the Black Sea, going all the way to China, basically. There was this big movement of people out of the grasslands and they swept across Europe and we can map this kind of by looking at the DNA of skeletons, how they moved across Europe.

[00:39:54] And this movement of people happens as wagons and horses were also introduced into Europe. And so we can infer from this that this population movement was responsible for the spread of Indo-European languages. But interestingly, there's kind of a few language isolates in Europe. So languages that aren't related to any Basque—

[00:40:14] Jordan Harbinger: And Hungarian.

[00:40:14] Jonathan Kennedy: Basque seems to be the language that was spoken by the people that lived in Europe before this big movement of so called steppe herders.

[00:40:23] Jordan Harbinger: Huh?

[00:40:23] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. This is another kind of interesting artifact.

[00:40:26] Jordan Harbinger: You know, I didn't really think about that. I just thought a specific population had either evolved their own language or moved to that area, but actually it's the equivalent of having a state in the United States that speaks, whatever, Apache, Native American language, entirely. And it's because they just somehow managed to not get overtaken by the Neolithic farmers, who had wagons. Do they live in mountains or something? How come they survived and nobody else seems to have preserved their language and culture?

[00:40:55] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, the Basque country is pretty mountainous. It's kind of the border of Spain and Spain and France. And so, yeah, they seem to have managed to avoid the pressures to speak this new language.

[00:41:05] Jordan Harbinger: There's a massive historical advantages to being a really big pain in the ass to either invade, conquer, or travel through, right? It's just, if you live on the edge of something and you're really high up or really far down, it's like, "I'm not going all the way up there just to oppress people. I've got enough slaves or labor or animals or resources down here. I'm not climbing all the way up there."

[00:41:26] The book has a lot of different sort of historical plagues and as almost landmarks in history, Greece, Sparta, Athens, ancient Greece for between the power balance between Sparta and Athens. I'd love to skip ahead though to the Roman Empire because you've got the Antonine Plague and you describe the Roman baths and sewage system, which is just a marvel of the entire world, right? The aqueducts and the fact that they had this massive sewage system and the bath houses and the water coming in. So it's simultaneously one of the coolest inventions in history, but also super revolting. I mean, it's just absolutely a miracle that any of those people survived having that kind of system in place because as disgusting as it does show you how resilient humans can be, but man, is it gross. Can you speak to that a little bit? Like I said, it's a miracle anybody made it out of there alive.

[00:42:18] Jonathan Kennedy: I mean, I guess when you travel to Rome or former Roman cities today, you see the infrastructure that they built. If you go to Rome, you can still see evidence of the baths and the aqueducts that brought kind of this enormous amount of fresh water flowing into the city. And it seems like, yeah, it must have been a pretty clean place. But actually, when you think about it, when you look at the evidence, it was pretty gross.

[00:42:42] So people would go to these communal baths. Sometimes they had the capacity for several thousand people. It's not clear how often the water was changed and the bathers certainly didn't use soap. They maybe used a bit of olive oil. The baths would have a fair amount of kind of fecal matter and other stuff. It would be pretty—

[00:43:03] Jordan Harbinger: Ugh. Can you imagine how they smelled too? I mean, all the BO from all the people and yeah, no soap. Didn't they rub olive oil on and then basically scrape it off right into the water too? So there's just this, I don't even want to—

[00:43:14] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, no, no, exactly. And something even grosser perhaps is the communal toilet.

[00:43:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:43:19] Jonathan Kennedy: Again, you can still see these communal toilets in various places. Some of them are even made of marble. So it's just these big rows of marble with holes in, over the sewers. And it seems pretty civilized, but then you remember that there's no kind of barriers. So everyone's just sat there doing their business and there was no toilet paper either. So, the Romans had these sponges on sticks that seemed to be shared—

[00:43:42] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh.

[00:43:43] Jonathan Kennedy: —in communal bathrooms, which is—

[00:43:45] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, sorry for anybody who's listening to this over their lunch hour. I was not expecting that. That's so disgusting. "Oh, don't worry. I'll just wash it off in the bath water. I'll be right back."

[00:43:56] Jonathan Kennedy: The sewers weren't great either. So apparently you had kind of regular exposures that would thrust fire and human waste out of the—

[00:44:05] Jordan Harbinger: Fire? Oh, because of the gas lighting, igniting—

[00:44:08] Jonathan Kennedy: The gas—

[00:44:08] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my god.

[00:44:09] Jonathan Kennedy: The methane, whatever, and the heat would build up and then, there'd be these kind of periodic explosions that would fire poo out of the toilets.

[00:44:18] Jordan Harbinger: Into the air for everyone to enjoy.

[00:44:20] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah.

[00:44:20] Jordan Harbinger: That's really, really, really gross. That's even worse. I thought the shared bathwater thing was gross. That is next level disgusting. Wow. So shockingly, they had plagues in the Roman Empire. Can we talk about that? Because you mentioned coin production is kind of almost a barometer of how well the population was doing. And I thought that was also quite fascinating.

[00:44:43] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. So I think, you know, maybe we should start with the Pax Romana. So this was this period for about 150, 200, 200 years at the beginning of the first millennium. And it was a time of unprecedented peace, obviously, but also prosperity. Rome was a city of a million people. So perhaps London in the 19th century was the next city to reach the size. It's really remarkable that 2,000 years ago, there was a city that was this big, even if we kind of could be disgusted by the state of the public health. It's still remarkable that you had a city of that size and you had enormous amount of trade within the empire, but also you had trade links with Sub-Saharan Africa with India. And you even had kind of people traveling as far as China in the middle of the second century AD.

[00:45:34] I guess kind of so often in the story of this book, progress, technological development improves lives for people, but it also creates the perfect conditions for pandemic. So again, kind of this increased interaction with the wider world and basically kind of created opportunities for infectious diseases to kind of travel into the empire from outside the citizens had no immunity to and then, of course, because it was such a heavily populated, urbanized, well-connected polity, basically, this created really the perfect conditions for infectious diseases to spread. And so you have a couple of really devastating pandemics in, well, the middle of the second century, in the middle of the third century.

[00:46:19] And we can look at eyewitness accounts to understand what was going on, but as you say, one of the really interesting ways that scientists have discovered, you can understand what was going on is by looking at ice cores dug in the Arctic or drilled in the Arctic. And this allows you to go back and look at ice laid down 2,000 years ago and see what the quality of the water and the air was like. And so basically, scientists really ingeniously have looked at the lead pollution through ancient times and lead pollution is important because it would be a by product of processing silver ore.

[00:46:57] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:58] Jonathan Kennedy: So when lots of silver ore was being mined and processed and used for creating Roman coinage, then there'd be lots of lead pollution in the ice for those years. But you see kind of an absolute collapse in the middle of the second century AD, and it gets even, even worse in the mid-third century when you have what's called the Plague of Cyprian, which seems to cause kind of absolute chaos in the empire.

[00:47:25] And it does manage to recover, but it's never, never quite the same again. And this is certainly the kind of the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire as we know it. In, in big part because the Romans, in their urbanized, populous, well-connected empire are really badly affected. But then, you have these so-called barbarians, as the Romans called them, who were living beyond the borders in conditions that were much less conducive for the spread of infectious diseases. So Rome wasn't just weakened in absolute terms by these pandemics. It was also weakened relative to its neighbors. And this created opportunities for the barbarians to breach the kind of rivers of the north, the Rhine and the Danube, and also to kind of attack from other directions, too.

[00:48:09] Jordan Harbinger: What was the big one hemorrhagic flu? It's like Ebola, right? You're bleeding from your eyes, ears and nose. I mean, it's really bad. I mean, I think Ebola still kills like half the people it infects, even with modern medicine. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit. I'm not sure.

[00:48:24] Jonathan Kennedy: No, no, that's about right. So yeah, Kyle Harper, certainly, the historian, he looks at the eyewitness accounts and cross references that with modern medicine. And he reckons that the Plague of Cyprian was, yeah, some kind of hemorrhagic fever, something like Ebola. And, you know, that's a really, really deadly disease. It's also interesting, you know, kind of certainly these plagues had a devastating effect on the empire, but they also created opportunities for other ideas to emerge. And it's interesting to think about the impact that the Plague of Cyprian seems to have had on religion.

[00:48:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I'd love to talk about that because it's basically yet of a tiny sect of Judaism, Christianity, that's now over two billion people. How did the plague influence this? And I'd like to really break this down so Christians listening can learn about this. I'm not religious, but I would wager that most Christians don't know about this and would find it really interesting because I'd never heard this in my life.

[00:49:20] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. So I think the thing to remember is that Christianity didn't immediately emerge as a empire wide religion during the life of Christ or even immediately afterwards. So in the beginning of the third century AD, Christianity was, as you say, still a really small sect of Judaism. It maybe had a hundred thousand followers out of a population of 70 or 80 million in the empire. So something like Sikhism in the US today, I think, if my calculations are correct. And then, all of a sudden, in the second half of the third century, you see the popularity of Christianity absolutely explode. We know this by looking at the numbers of Christian burials in the catacombs of Rome, or by looking at the increased percentage of people who have Christian names in papyrus documents that have survived in the arid Egyptian desert. And then, yeah, in 312, Constantine, the Roman Empire, converts to Christianity, and then a decade later, Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire. You know, that's the beginning of Christianity becoming a world religion. It's a really, really important step in the development of Christianity towards something like what we see today.

[00:50:33] And there's a big mystery, why did this happen? Why was Christianity not that popular for a couple of hundred years? And then very, very popular. from the middle of the third century onwards. And I think the most convincing explanation, and this is one that's put forward by a variety of people, certainly Rodney Stark, sociologist, argues this, that basically Christianity provided a much more assuring guidance to life and death during an age of pandemics than paganism did. So paganism had been the great religion of the Greco-Roman world. And they believed that pandemics were caused by angry gods. That it was the arrows of Apollo that, that kind of made people ill.

[00:51:14] And pagans also didn't really have a very well-developed idea of the afterlife. They thought that the here-and-now was the, was basically the main show. And there were some vague ideas of what happened afterwards, but it wasn't very, very nice. And then, the message of Jesus is really different, right?

[00:51:33] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:33] Jonathan Kennedy: It's this idea that—

[00:51:33] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:51:34] Jonathan Kennedy: —you know, pain and suffering in this life can help us buy or help us kind of enter this kind of eternal paradise in the next life. So all of a sudden provides meaning to what was going on, this kind of horrific sickness that people were experiencing. It was no longer some kind of meaningless anger of god that we couldn't understand. We were suffering for a reason.

[00:51:59] And I think the other thing is that Christianity really emphasizes the importance of good deeds as a way of gaining favor with God. And so you have these eyewitness accounts of Christian bishops saying how the pagans abandon their dead and try and run away from the plague, whereas the Christians take them in and they care for them. And although, as we said, kind of Ebola or another hemorrhagic fevers, they're really deadly. If Christians were, you know, even giving these sick people water and some food and some shelter, this would have decreased the mortality rate by maybe something like two-thirds, I think Kyle Harper estimates.

[00:52:35] So this, basically, gives Christians the best commercial that any religion could ever have, which is—

[00:52:41] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:52:41] Jonathan Kennedy: —miracles or miracles in inverted commas. And so this seems to help explain why you have this explosion of interest in Christianity in the second half of the third.

[00:52:52] Jordan Harbinger: Not only does it look like it works, but you're like, "Oh, these people have my back. I should probably join them because my entire family just ran away from me. First, my eyes start bleeding and everybody, everybody just leaves me behind. It's totally unfair." Yeah, I kind of get it.

[00:53:05] Jonathan Kennedy: And you start seeing the plague as a good thing. It's kind of, "It's testing me. It's testing my faith. I don't need to worry. If I die, I'll end up in a better place."

[00:53:14] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. You really find out who your friends are when you start hemorrhaging blood from every orifice.

[00:53:19] Jonathan Kennedy: Exactly.

[00:53:23] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Jonathan Kennedy. We'll be right back.

[00:53:28] This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Are you toying with the idea of hitting the eject button on a relationship? Maybe you're adding a baby for your next life chapter, perhaps thinking about leaving the hometown you grew up in for a different country. Whatever the juncture in life, therapy can help you map out your future and trust yourself to find the way forward. Many folks have this image that therapy is exclusive for folks, who've just ridden the gnarliest waves of life's traumas. Sure, therapy's awesome for that, no doubt. But real talk here, life's a roller coaster. We're all screaming on the dips and turns. If you're not, are you even buckled in for the ride? Have you even lived if you haven't hit a little bit of a bump here and there? Engaging in therapy can be instrumental in mastering effective stress management techniques, establishing personal limits and boundaries, finding out which path to go toward. It's a great tool for unlocking your highest potential. I'm a firm believer in it myself. If you've ever considered giving therapy a shot, try BetterHelp. It's all online. Just breeze through a short questionnaire. You'll be paired with a licensed therapist. And hey, if it's not a match made in therapy heaven, swap therapist at any time, no additional charge.

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[00:57:42] Now for the rest of my conversation with Jonathan Kennedy.

[00:57:47] And another cheerful topic, how about the Black Death? This started and essentially leads to what we now know as modern capitalism. It really changed the entire world and the economics of Europe at the time.

[00:58:00] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. So I think it's important to think what the world was like at the beginning of the 1300s. In, certainly, Western Europe, you had a feudal system, where basically you had the king at the top and you had these big aristocratic clans that were sometimes warring with one another that, hopefully, provided support for the king at various times. And the king would give them the right to kind of control some land. And then, those aristocratic clans would give lesser lords the right to control that land. And you had this kind of basically pyramid of obligation. It was very much like the game of thrones and this kind of worked reasonably well in a society where politics was very unstable because basically allowed people to raise armies, but it was not conducive at all to any kind of innovation.

[00:58:46] Basically, if you're a lord, you want to spend any surplus that you have on either kind of building up an army or building your castle to defend yourself. And if you don't do that, another lord will, who spent all his money on his army and his castles will come along and will take your little kind of area of land off you.

[00:59:06] Jordan Harbinger: Your fiefdom.

[00:59:07] Jonathan Kennedy: Your fiefdom. Yeah. And it's pretty similar if you're a peasant, if you're a serf at the very bottom of the pyramid as well. If you're a serf, you want to take a really risk averse approach because, you know, if you grow too much, the Lord might take all that stuff off you and you just want to make sure that you have enough to live. So you plant different crops in different places on the estate and you hope that some of it survives wild animals and bad weather and maybe marauding armies. So you have enough to live throughout the year. So basically, kind of the economy more or less stagnates. You've had no real increase in the majority of population. Things haven't really got better since Roman times.

[00:59:45] But then, all of a sudden, you have this massive exogenous shock. You have the Black Death. It comes from Central Asia. It spreads throughout Europe. Some estimates suggest that it kills up to 60 percent of the population in about eight years.

[01:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my god. Can you imagine living through that? Holy cow.

[01:00:03] Jonathan Kennedy: That's terrible. But the thing is that, you know, the plague returned again and again. You had the second plague in 1361 that killed maybe 30 percent of the population. And it just keeps returning every few decades for hundreds of years. For example, the population of Britain doesn't recover to pre-Black Death levels until about the early 18th century. There's this kind of massive demographic scar and really, really horrific. But the interesting thing is that this provides the impetus to, basically, revolutionize European society.

[01:00:38] So certainly, you see in England, there's all of a sudden, a big struggle between the serfs and the lords because the serfs all of a sudden realized that lands plentiful and labour is scarce. And so they want better conditions and the lords fight back. They use their domination of Parliament to pass various laws. Laws that basically ban serfs from moving from one manner to another. When that fails, they pass other laws that say that if you move from one manner, you can have your forehead branded with the letter F for falsity. I never quite got that, but yeah, and then another interesting law that was passed were kind of Sumptuary law. So basically, they tried to regulate the clothes that people in various classes could wear and even the foods that they could eat. And this basically suggests a period of great kind of social upheaval where the upper classes were really concerned with what was going on and they wanted to keep the lower orders in their place.

[01:01:38] But eventually, the lord's efforts to stop change to kind of keep back the demographic tides failed. And about a hundred years after the Black Death, basically every serf had won their freedom. And you still continued with this struggle and basically the situation that you ended up with maybe 200 years after the Black Death was one in which the lord still owned the land, but they rented it out at market rates to the most entrepreneurial peasants who basically had big plots. And because it was at market rates, they had to use the latest technology. They had to grow crops that were particularly suited to the climate and to the soil. And so you have this massive boom in agricultural productivity that basically kind of enables the growth of cities because an increasing proportion of population are able to live in cities and even the food prices begin to fall, which means that workers have more, more money to spend.

[01:02:39] And this really kind of kick starts industrialization because they want to spend this money on manufactured goods. So things like textiles, but it also has an impact on colonization because people get a taste for sugar and they increasingly want to spend their money on sugar. So you see the kind of colonization of Caribbean islands and in order to grow sugar cane.

[01:03:01] Jordan Harbinger: So interesting that a disease kind of kickstarted capitalism. It just killed enough of the labor force that they were like, "Wait a minute. I have more value than subsistence. You have to pay me now. Now, I'm going to brand your forehead," which by the way, we should almost edit that out. I don't want to give Amazon any ideas, but the idea that they could try to enforce that was just like a losing battle. If you think you look at capitalism now, it was a losing battle from the beginning. I know I'm going to take flack for this. I'm going to get a zillion emails. It really does look like the authoritarian communism that you'd see in like the Soviet Union. "No, you just have to work and you just have to take miserable wages and we're just going to do this." It's like, well, actually I'm just going to sell things on the black market. I'm going to walk out the back of the factory and it's going to breed corruption and it just capitalism. It's just sort of finds a way. It's like water in a container with cracks in it. It's really, really interesting.

[01:03:51] The diseases also seem to have played a role in wars. We didn't touch on the Greek stuff, but at least in the Spanish takeover of South America, I didn't know this, but the Spanish were relatively small number of troops, which makes sense, right? They came over on boats, but that civilization that they took over was absolutely huge. Rivaled those of Europe in many ways, especially in terms of the numbers and population. And history kind of tells you it was horses, or depending on what history you're reading, it might be miracles and horses. Good old fashioned racism plays a part too, right? The white man was sophisticated and the locals weren't. They were just naked, running around eating berries or whatever. It's just not true. It really turns out to be germs, germs, germs, from the sound of it.

[01:04:33] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, I think, that's a really good way of putting it. So, I mean, one point to make is, as you say, there's this idea that the Americas was populated by a really kind of backward population, but actually the evidence suggests that there were certainly some really quite advanced civilizations.

[01:04:54] If we look at the Mexico, the Aztecs, they had this vast island city, Tenochtitlan, which is now the site of Mexico City that had maybe a population of 100,000, 200,000 people. So it was perhaps about four times the size of the biggest city in Spain at the time, Seville. And eventually Hernán Cortés managed to conquer this great Mexico Empire with a thousand troops and even accounting for the fact that he had some horses and he had some pretty unreliable guns. It's really hard to explain without resorting to miracles. But, you know, actually, the key factor here seems to be infectious diseases and smallpox in particular, which devastated the Mexico and then actually raced ahead of the Spanish and ended up kind of causing massive disruption in South America and devastating the Inca Empire, another great, really sophisticated, advanced empire before the Europeans even arrived.

[01:05:53] And you get Francisco Pizarro, turning up with 168 men and managing to conquer this vast empire of maybe seven, eight million people. And yeah, no, I think if you look at what happened in the America's in the 1500s, it's really shocking. You have first smallpox, then pandemic after pandemic that doesn't affect the Europeans at all. And, you know, literally decimates the indigenous population. The population of the Americas at the beginning of the century is something like 60 million. And at the end of the century, it's six million.

[01:06:29] And again, going back to ice core data, scientists have noticed a dip in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air in the 16th century. Because so many American people died, so many Native American people died. They were no longer engaging in this slash-and-burn agriculture. You can actually see this in kind of ice cores. And, you know, scientists have even suggested that this led to a fall in the world temperature and contributed to the coldest period of the little Ice Age. When the Thames in London froze over for several months every winter and entrepreneurial Londoners built bars and cafes and ice rinks on the river. So again, this kind of, yeah, it's a fascinating story that reminds us of our interconnectedness and the vulnerability of certain populations to infectious diseases.

[01:07:20] Jordan Harbinger: So, we hear about how cold, smallpox, stomach bugs, whatever, killed all these indigenous people who were not used to these germs and had no immunity, but how come it didn't work the other way around? How come the Spanish didn't roll into South America, immediately just get wrecked by some disease that the indigenous people have had endemic for thousands of years already? How come they didn't have a common cold that just decimated the Spanish? Is that just really bad luck for the indigenous people and really good luck for the Spanish? Or does it have to do with the animal herding and things like that?

[01:07:53] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, that's a good question because there were certainly kind of urbanized societies in the Americas and societies that engaged in settled agriculture. So, there's a question why did infectious diseases emerge in the wake of the agricultural revolution in Europe, but not so much in the Americas, and the answer is pretty simple. And actually kind of, this is one point where Jared Diamond is pretty spot on. He points out—

[01:08:16] Jordan Harbinger: He wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, right?

[01:08:18] Jonathan Kennedy: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yeah. And he points out that there aren't that many domesticatable animals in the Americas. You have Muscovy ducks, turkeys, a few others, llamas, alpacas, and the only ones of these that are herd animals are alpacas and llamas and herd animals are particularly interesting because if animals live in big herds, then it provides opportunities for infectious diseases to kind of emerge and be maintained in the community. But alpacas and llamas, they didn't live in really big herds. And so you don't see, you don't see the emergence of these kind of neolithic infectious diseases in the Americas that you see in Europe. But there is maybe one infectious disease that has its origins in the Americas. And that's syphilis, which, you know, caused much pain, much embarrassment to medieval Europeans or late medieval, early modern Europeans, but it didn't cause the kind of devastation that smallpox—

[01:09:19] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[01:09:19] Jonathan Kennedy: —or measles or flu caused.

[01:09:21] Jordan Harbinger: So there were infectious diseases that would have ravaged parts of the population, but it was more like it burns when I pee as opposed to my entire village is wiped out kind of consequences.

[01:09:30] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:09:31] Jordan Harbinger: Got it.

[01:09:31] Jonathan Kennedy: You can put it that way. Okay.

[01:09:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I'm just an irreverent prick, I think. So your book really does underline the idea that Cortés was losing horribly against the locals, but then smallpox killed something like half the population inside of a few months, or was it a few years? That level of devastation is really something. It's hard to imagine that level of devastation. How many dead are we talking about? Do you know numbers off the top of your head?

[01:09:58] Jonathan Kennedy: They estimate a third of the population in a few months, but then, you know, you have other diseases that cause similar levels of devastation. I think the real important thing to remember is the fact that the Europeans weren't affected. And you can kind of start to imagine the impact that that must have had on the indigenous population, right? We must have seemed like we had some kind of superpower or I guess kind of our gods were just better than theirs. And this maybe helps to explain why, you know, kind of much of Central and South America today is still so religious, you know, the indigenous populations of the Americas seem to really kind of adopt Christianity in such a kind of enthusiastic way and that enthusiasm endures to this day.

[01:10:44] Jordan Harbinger: By the way, if you're not eating right now you can go ahead and google smallpox and click on images and you will not like what you see. Because smallpox is a really bad. It's a really disgusting way to go and to watch like half your population die of this you would be running to the nearest person who could tell you that it was the fault of having a weak god. I mean, you really would. Actually, though, it wasn't even just the Spanish who defeated the local empire, right? They fought aside rebellious tributaries who later also got killed by smallpox. So it almost sounds like the Spanish were there to, as is sort of typical of colonizers, to loot, steal, stir the pot, and kind of just pick up the pieces for the surviving, from the survivors.

[01:11:23] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, the last men standing, and then they built the colony, I guess, on the ruins of the empires that they took over.

[01:11:31] Jordan Harbinger: Quite literally. Where are you seeing modern examples of diseases altering the course of history, or is it too early to tell? Can you only see these things five hundred years later?

[01:11:41] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, I think if we look at the book, a lot of these examples play out over decades and centuries but I guess kind of the thing is history has speed it up quite a lot in the last few hundred years. If we think that it took a good 18 months for the Black Death to get from Constantinople all the way to, to Northern Europe in the middle of the 14th century, whereas, you know, COVID, it was discovered in the autumn of 2019 and a couple of months later, it was kind of a real cause for concern. And yeah, it's a fool's errand to predict the future, but I think we are starting to see the long-term impacts of COVID, but also our response to COVID play out right.

[01:12:24] I'm certainly not so sure how it is in the US but in the UK we have really sky high inflation at the moment.

[01:12:30] Jordan Harbinger: Same.

[01:12:30] Jonathan Kennedy: And this is a kind of large consequence of the government response and the increase in borrowing and the impact that has had on the economy. But there's also some quite positive impacts of the pandemic. If we look, for example, at the increasing possibilities to work from home, it's been absolutely transformative for so many people as someone with a young child, it's really made my life so much better that, you know, working from home is much more, much more accepted now.

[01:12:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It sounds silly when you say it like that, right? It's like millions dead, sky high inflation, crumbling economy. On the other hand, I can do this interview with no pants on. So I got that going for me, but yeah, you're right. It really does increase the quality of life, in general.

[01:13:15] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah. For those of us that have survived are lucky to have middle class jobs. But, yeah, there's all sorts of things playing out and I think we have to wait and see. But I think there's a bigger, you know, it's also played a bigger role in the kind of ideological struggle that we see in the world, right? If we think of the response of the UK and the US where it was just the liberal, let the virus rip, see what happens. You know, it was pretty devastating. And I wouldn't advocate the Chinese response. That was pretty terrifying as well. It was a really effective way of stopping the disease spread to have these really strict lockdowns, but it has a massive consequence on all our social lives and on the economy. But certainly, I think it kind of made liberal democracies like the US and the UK look a little weak and a little, little vulnerable. And I think we're seeing that play out in world politics at the moment with increasing numbers of countries in, you know, certainly Africa and other parts of the world looking to China and Russia as their example of what to follow.

[01:14:22] Jordan Harbinger: That will be interesting. And I think from a disease or health perspective. We're likely to see, and this is my sort of uninformed dude bro opinion, I'm wondering what you think, the connection between wealth, poverty, and healthy eating affecting things like life expectancy and frankly, also, probably immunity at some level. Because you and I are sitting here on Zoom, or the equivalent thereof, SquadCast.fm, rep that company, but we're sitting here doing our work as knowledge workers, sitting on our butts at home. There's plenty of people listening to this right now who are like, "Yeah, easy for you two schmucks to say, I'm in the Amazon warehouse listening to you idiots while I pack your crap, or I'm serving food for people like you. I can't just sit at home. So, you know, what you're, I can't relate." And I understand that and those people are far more vulnerable to the next pandemic than we will be with the option to just never leave. Those people are the people that have to go pick up my stuff from DoorDash and bring it to my door and leave it there, right? Like, they're just completely left out of this and I feel like that could really play a part in the next one if we're still doing that kind of thing.

[01:15:28] Jonathan Kennedy: Yeah, and I think that's another important lesson in the book that, you know, of course, the COVID pandemic was about the virus. But it was also about the way that we or our societies created conditions for the virus to affect some people much worse than others. So, you know, people in the poorest parts of the country, people with particular jobs, as you point out, people from particular ethnic groups suffered much more than others. And these pandemics are a social phenomenon, as well as a kind of biomedical phenomenon. We need to remember that.

[01:16:00] And that's another reason to be hopeful, right? Because social problems should be easier to sort out. I mean, I talk about this a bit in the book, going back to the 19th century and the way in which kind of urban slums created the perfect conditions for cholera and TB. But eventually politicians got together and they invested in better housing and better sanitation in fresh water and they resolved the problem. And I think, bearing in mind we're living in a new golden age for infectious diseases, a golden age 2.0, then I think there's an argument that politicians society, businesses have to get together again and kind of understand how the best way to make ourselves resilient to the next pandemic is in part to invest in new medical technology, but also to create a healthier society anyway. A society in which people are going to be able to kind of survive the next pandemic when it comes. And that's a social and economic or political issue as much as much as the medical one.

[01:17:01] Jordan Harbinger: Thank you so much, pathogenesis, really interesting history of the world in several diseases. We didn't even talk about, again, ancient Greece. We skipped through Rome quite quickly, but you even get into slavery in the US, which I am sort of grateful we didn't have time to touch on, because that's one where I'm like, oh, let's make this not horribly offensive. And you do well in the book, but I'll leave people to it. And thank you once again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it, fascinating conversation.

[01:17:30] Jonathan Kennedy: Thank you so much, Jordan. I really enjoyed it. It was great to talk to someone who clearly has read or listened to the book. And yeah, it's really humbling. You spend all this time in your spare room working on this and it's lovely to have a conversation. So thanks, thanks for that.

[01:17:46] Jordan Harbinger: You got it. I hope it spreads like the plague.

[01:17:49] Jonathan Kennedy: Thank you so much. Well, have a great rest of the day.

[01:17:53] Jordan Harbinger: You too. Take care.

[01:17:54] Jonathan Kennedy: Take care. Bye, bye.

[01:17:56] Jordan Harbinger: You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show about the warning signs for civil war.

[01:18:02] Barbara F. Walter: There were times when I was writing that I myself started to get terrified. Is this right? Am I getting this right? Because what I'm saying is going to hit people hard, there have been hundreds of studies of civil wars. The group that tends to start these wars are the once dominant groups that are in decline. The group that has been politically, socially, economically dominant since the very beginning of this country, white Christian males for the most part. America is going through this radical demographic transition from a white majority country to a white minority country. White working class men have declined on most social and economic measures that hasn't happened with any other demographic groups. And there's a subset of this population that's deeply resentful of that, that's deeply threatened by that, and truly, truly believe that it's their patriotic duty to do something about this.

[01:19:01] January 6th was so public, it was so obvious. This is part of a far-right, white supremacist, anti federal government movement here in the United States. We know that some of the far-right militias, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters actively encouraged members to join the military, to join law enforcement. If you continuously portray this as these are just crazy individuals, then you remain blind to what's actually the cancer that's growing slowly from within.

[01:19:38] Jordan Harbinger: To hear whether we're on the cusp of a civil war here in the United States, check out episode 718 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:19:46] We didn't get to this on the show, but even more scary is how diseases can be essentially stored in certain species for thousands of years. I'm not talking about the stuff they're digging up in the permafrost. That's a whole different thing but Central Asian tribes, they have rules for dealing with certain animals that might carry diseases that predate human knowledge of pathogens.

[01:20:06] The Old Testament has a bunch of this stuff too, right? When you look at religious or pseudo religious rules about trapping and touching certain animals, Central Asia, they have rules with like marmots. And in the Old Testament, you know, the whole don't eat pork thing, that was probably because pigs are really, really gross, right? They roll around in their own crap all the time. They carry all kinds of trichinosis and whatnot. There's a lot of cloven hoof and this and that and the other thing in the Old Testament. There's reasons for that that have to do with pathogens before germ theory was even a thing.

[01:20:37] I do wonder if there will be a future edition of this book in 100 years where we talk about how climate change forced animals with diseases towards the human population. The permafrost thing that killed half the planet. Who knows? I mean, I think we're kind of the beginning of some of the pandemics we're going to see just due to modern science and climate change.

[01:20:55] And fun fact I thought was interesting. The word quarantine actually just is kind of a play off the word 40 because when ships merchant ships would come to Italy way back in the day, 40 days was about as long or longer than it took for people on that ship to develop symptoms of whatever crazy disease they brought with them on that boat so they put the ship in quarantine meaning nobody gets on nobody gets off for 40 days. And then, they can see if, I don't know, if anyone's left after that then they can unload the ship Interesting idea, but it just shows you how cognizant people were and are of pathogens. And that is not going to change anytime soon.

[01:21:31] Hope you all enjoyed this episode. All things Jonathan Kennedy will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot on the website transcripts in the show notes as well. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. All at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We've also got the newsletter. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well, also at jordanharbinger.com/course. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

[01:22:13] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. And the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in history, science, diseases, or the history of science and diseases, share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn. I don't know, go wash your hands or something. And we'll see you next time.

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[01:23:37] Paula Barros: Hi, Cold Case Files fans. We have some exciting news for you. Brand new episodes of Cold Case Files are dropping in your feed. And I'm your new host, Paula Barros. I'm a Cold Case Files superfan, true crime aficionado, and I love telling stories with unbelievable twists and turns. And this season of Cold Case Files has all of that and more.

[01:23:58] Her cause of death was strangulation.

[01:24:01] Male 1: Lying face down on the bed.

[01:24:02] Male 2: She was in a pretty advanced state of decomposition.

[01:24:05] Male 3: He panicked and decided he was getting rid of the body.

[01:24:07] Female: I saw danger in everything.

[01:24:09] Paula Barros: So get ready. You don't want to miss what this season has in store. New episodes of Cold Case Files drops every Tuesday. Subscribe to Cold Case Files wherever you get your podcasts.