This is a Headgun Podcast.

Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing shit that they know that I don't know and that you might not know.

Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we're going to have so much fun doing it.

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Now this week on the show, we're talking about viruses. I love viruses so much. Now I know it's weird to say I love viruses.

I don't like it when they infect me and get me sick. I don't like it when they when they shut down our entire society.

I don't like when they kill loved ones of mine or anyone's loved ones.

I do find viruses endlessly fascinating as a form of life because by thinking about viruses, we can get a sense of what life is at the absolute minimum.

When I think about viruses, it makes me realize that life is nothing but a complicated chemical reaction because viruses are just a teeny tiny little sequence of chemical instructions that hack ourselves and control how they replicate and cause ourselves to replicate the virus instead of themselves.

They are alive, as you'll hear me grapple with in the episode, they are alive. Evolution and natural selection do work on them.

But they are such an absolutely minimal, simple form of life that it makes me think about how all of us at the end of the day are just a complicated series of chemicals reproducing themselves through the laws of physics and chemistry.

And that is so fucking cool. And not only that, by understanding them, we understand more about ourselves and the world around us.

Part of what makes mRNA vaccine so cool is that we are using some of the same mechanisms viruses use, but we're using it to hack our immune system so we can teach our body to fight back against diseases like COVID-19 that it has never encountered before.

It's a tiny little hack with massive world historical impact. And that's true of viruses as well. They are so tiny and so simple in so many ways, but they're also a major player in our history, our society, and of course our lives.

Viruses can cause our entire global economy to shut down for years on end. They can throw governments out of power. They can kill us in droves. And as we'll discuss today, a virus became a flashpoint moment in the fight for LGBT rights.

Viruses are a biological force, but they are a social one as well. They start their work in ourselves, but they end up woven into the fabric of our world.

So to dive deep into this topic today, we have an incredible guest. Joseph Osmondson is a scientist and writer. He's a professor of biology at NYU, and most recently he's the author of virology essays for the living, the dead, and the small things in between.

I was so fascinated by this conversation. I laughed so much. He's one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking guests we've ever had on the show, and I know you're going to love it. Please welcome Joseph Osmondson.

Joseph, thank you so much for being on the show.

It is a true pleasure to be here.

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