Alex More on Pandemics, Climate, and Human Survival

In this episode of Life's Tough, Explorers are Tougher, Richard Wiese speaks with Dr. Alex More about an extraordinary journey that spans immigration, survival, scholarship, and discovery. Alex recounts leaving Italy as a teenager, navigating New York and Chicago with limited resources, and eventually building an academic career that led to Harvard and beyond. His story is one of persistence, risk, and the determination to keep asking bigger questions.

The conversation then expands into Alex’s research on climate, pandemics, and historical collapse. He explains how events like the Black Death and the Spanish flu were shaped not only by disease itself, but by wider systems involving weather, environment, migration, war, and public health. By combining climate records with historical evidence, Alex shows how interdisciplinary research can reveal patterns that traditional single-field approaches often miss.

This episode is both a personal story of resilience and a wider exploration of how deeply connected our world really is. It offers a powerful reminder that understanding today’s crises often requires looking across centuries, disciplines, and human systems.

This is Life's Tough, Explorers Are Tougher, with your host, Richard Weiss. Scratch the surface of an explorer and you'll find an adventure and a great story. This show is about their tales.

This podcast is a proud supporter of the Explorers Club and the EC50 Initiative. 50 people changing the world that the world needs to know about. For more information, go to explorers.org.