Name: Two Chapters From Our New Book – Exclusive Preview!
Uploaded: 2026-01-26T17:10:46.000Z
Duration: 25 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We'll listen to the introduction and a chapter from the Kurzgesagt book A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive.

Written by Kurzgesagt founder and head writer Philipp Detmer.

It's about the epic story of the immune system, the most important thing you don't know enough about and will forever change how you think about your body.

Immune will be released on November 2nd and you can pre order it right now.

Links in the Description so now get comfy for a rare audio only experience.

Introduction Imagine waking up tomorrow feeling a bit under the weather, an annoying pain in your throat, your nose is runny, you cough a bit.

You think as you step into the shower, pretty annoyed about how hard your life is.

While you are totally not being a whiny little baby, your immune system is not complaining.

It is busy keeping you alive so you can live to whine another day.

And so, while intruders roam your body, killing hundreds of thousands of your cells, your immune system is organizing complex defenses, communicating over vast distances, activating intricate defense networks and dishing out a swift death to millions if not billions of enemies, all while you are standing in the shower, mildly annoyed.

But this complexity is largely hidden, which is a real shame because there are not many things that have such a crucial impact on the quality of your life as your immune system.

It is all embracing and all encompassing, protecting you from bothersome nuisances like the common cold, scratches and cuts, to life threatening stuff from cancer and pneumonia to deadly infections like COVID 19.

Your immune system is as indispensable as your heart or your lungs, and

actually it is one of the largest and most widespread organ systems throughout your body.

Although we don't tend to think about it in these terms, for most of us the immune system is a vague and cloud like entity that follows strange and untransparent rules and which seems to sometimes work and sometimes not.

It is a bit like the weather, extremely hard to predict and subject to endless speculations and opinions resulting in actions that feel random to us.

Unfortunately, many people speak about the immune system with confidence, but

without actually understanding it, it can be hard to know which information to trust and why.

But what even is the immune system and how does it actually work?

Understanding the mechanisms that are keeping you alive as you read this is not just a nice exercise in intellectual curiosity, it is desperately needed knowledge.

If you know how the immune system works, you can understand and appreciate vaccines and how they can save your life or the lives of your children and approach disease and sickness with a very different mindset and far less fear.

You become less susceptible to snakehole salesmen who offer wonder drugs that are entirely devoid of logic.

You get a better grasp on the kinds of medication that might actually help you when you are sick.

You get to know what you can do to boost your immune system.

You can protect your kids from dangerous microbes while also not being too stressed out if they get dirty playing outside.

And in the very unlikely case of, say, a global pandemic, knowing what a virus does to you and how your body fights it might help you understand what the public health experts say.

Besides all these practical and useful things, the immune system is also simply beautiful, a wonder of nature like no other.

The immune system is not a mere tool to make your cough go away.

It is inextricably tied into almost all other processes in your body.

And while it is centrally important to keeping you alive, it is likely that it may also be the part of your body that causes your untimely death, either by failing or by being too active.

I have been fascinated and obsessed by the incredible complexity of the human immune system for the better part of a decade now.

It began in university, where I was studying information design and was looking for a semester project, and

the immune system seemed like a good idea.

So I got a large pile of books about immunology and began digging in.

But no matter how much I read, things just did not get less complicated.

The more I learned, the more impossible it seemed to simplify the immune system, as every layer revealed more mechanisms, more exceptions, more complexity.

And so a project that was supposed to last the spring took the summer, and

The interactions of the parts of the immune system were too elegant, and

the dance they danced was too beautiful to stop learning about them.

This progress fundamentally changed how I experienced and felt about my body.

When I got the flu, I could no longer just complain, but

had to look at my body, touch my swollen lymph nodes, and

visualize what my immune cells were doing right then, which part of the network was activated and how T cells killed millions of intruders to protect me.

When I cut myself while being careless in the forest, I felt gratitude for my macrophages, large immune cells hunting scared bact ripping them into pieces to protect the open wound from infection.

After taking a bite of the wrong granola bar and suffering an allergic shock while being rushed to the hospital, I thought about mast cells and IgE antibodies and how they had almost killed me in a misguided attempt to protect me from scary foodstuffs.

When I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 32 and had to undergo a couple of operations and then chemotherapy, My obsession with immunology became even more intense.

One of the jobs of my immune system is to kill cancer.

But I somehow could not be angry or too upset, as I had learned how hard of a job this was for my immune cells and how hard cancer had to work to keep them in check.

And as the chemo melted the cancer, my thoughts again went to my immune cells, invading the dying tumors and eating them up, one cell after another.

Disease and sickness are scary and unsettling, and I've had plenty of that in my life.

But knowing how my cells, my immune system, this integral and personal part of myself, defended the entity that is me, how it fought and died and healed and restored this body I inhabit always gave me a lot of comfort.

Learning about the immune system made my life better and more interesting, and

it alleviated a lot of the anxiety that comes with being sick.

Knowing about the immune system always put things in perspective.

just because of the fun of learning and reading about the immune system, it became an ongoing hobby as I eventually became a science communicator and explaining complex things became my purpose in life.

About eight years ago, I started Kurzgesagt in a nutshell, a YouTube channel dedicated to making information easy to understand and beautiful while trying to be as true to the science as possible.

In early 2021, the Kurzgesagt team has grown to over 40 people working on this vision, while the channel has attracted over 14 million subscribers and reaches about 30 million viewers each month.

So if this large platform exists, why go through the horrible process of writing this book?

Well, while some of our most successful videos have been about the immune system, it has always bugged me that I could not explore this wonderful topic in the depth it deserves.

A 10 minute video is simply not the right medium for that.

So this book is a way to turn my decade long love affair with the immune system into something tangible that will hopefully be a helpful and entertaining way to learn about the stunning and beautiful complexity that makes it possible for you to survive each day.

Unfortunately, the immune system is very complicated.

Although that is not strong enough a word.

The immune system is complicated in the sense that climbing Mount Everest is a nice stroll through nature.

It is intuitive, like reading the Chinese translation of the tax code of Germany is a fun Sunday afternoon the immune system is the most complex biological system known to humanity other than the human brain.

The bigger the immunology textbook you read, the more layers of detail start piling on.

The more exceptions to rules appear, the more intricate the system becomes, the the more specific it seems to be for every possible eventuality.

Every single one of its many parts has multiple jobs and functions and areas of expertise that overlap and influence each other.

Even if you make it past these challenges and still want to understand the immune system, you will encounter another problem.

Scientists have laid the foundation for the amazing modern world we get to enjoy today through hard work and endless curiosity.

And we owe them a great deal of gratitude.

Unfortunately, though, many scientists are really bad at choosing good names and coming up with accessible language for the things they discover.

The science of immunology is one of the worst culprits of any scientific discipline in this regard.

An already breathtakingly complex field is spiked with words like major histocompatibility, complex, class 1 and 2, gamma delta, t cells, interferon, alpha, beta, gamma and kappa, and

the complement system with actors named C4B2A 3B comple.

None of this makes it a pleasure to pick up a textbook and learn about the immune system on your own.

But even without this barrier, the complex relationships of the many different actors of the immune system, with countless exceptions and unintuitive rules, are a challenge all by themselves.

Immunology is hard, even for the people working in public health, even for the people studying immunology, even for the foremost experts in the field.

All of this makes the immune system horrible to explain.

If you venture too far into simplification, you deprive the learner of the beauty and wonder that lie in the evolutionary genius of the sheer endless complexity that deals with the most crucial problems of living beings.

But if you include too much detail, it quickly becomes mind numbingly hard to keep up with.

Listing everything, every part of the immune system is just too much.

It would be like telling someone your whole life story on the first date.

Overwhelming and very likely to make them less interested in dating you.

So my aim for this book is to try to carefully dance around all these problems.

It will use human language and use complicated words only when necessary.

Processes and interactions will be simplified while staying as true to the science as possible.

Complexity between chapters will go up and down.

So after you are fed a lot of information, there will be more chill parts to relax a bit, and

we will summarize what we learned in regular intervals.

I want this book to make it possible for everybody to understand their own immune system and have a bit of fun doing so.