All The Ways Your Microbes Make You YOU

You are a human being. Which means "you" are actually one human plus the trillions of microscopic life forms living in you. And "you" are living in a civilization that's only had microscopes since the 1670s, and only begun to understand what microscopes reveal. And "you" are living on a planet that was dominated by microbial life for about half its natural history, with more complex species only showing up in the last quarter, like a Miami Heat fan in between South Beach clubs. Which all begs the question: is this the microbes' world, and we're just living in it? And what does that mean for us as a species? On this week's episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt sits down with science journalist Ed Yong (The Atlantic) for a look at the incredible world of microbes we've been living in this whole time, covered brilliantly in Ed's book I Contain Multitudes. Find out how trillions of tiny bacteria & germs guide everything from your nutrition, to our psychology, to the evolution of life on earth itself. Footnotes: https://goo.gl/FmPZnz