The Pandemic, Um, Is It a Disaster?

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Looking at the history of North America makes this event look completely different to me. One of the reasons that those epidemics were so devastating is that people who had grown up without any idea of communicable diseases was experiencing them. And you're seeing that because now we have so little experience with that. You're seeing really crazy things in our own response to the pandemic that result from a lack of real understanding of how diseases spread.

This week Adam welcomes an author whose book blew his mind more than perhaps any other. Americans are typically taught that prior to the arrival of European settlers, indigenous communities were sparsely populated, lacked technology, and did little to shape the natural landscape. But as this week’s guest Charles C. Mann’s 1491 tells Adam, the most recent research reveals that the American indigenous civilizations were sophisticated, dynamic, and massively populated. Purchase his books 1491 and 1493 at http://factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.