The Rare Pokemon Virus You WANT To Catch! | The SCIENCE of... Pokemon (Pokerus)

dear nintendo hi it's me austin etc etc oh what am i am i not enthusiastic enough sorry i am really tired i just got over being sick with some sort of stomach thing so i'm avoiding caffeine because i can do wonky things your digestive tract last thing i need is a diuretic right now but i am here i'm sharp my bowels are empty and my mind is clear so speaking of being sick let's talk about viruses specifically the pokebras virus in pokemon this is something that's been on my radar for a while and it wasn't actually my idea it was an idea given to me by youtuber tierzoo years ago because that dude did microbiology in college and that's where his brain goes apparently anyway i'm finally gonna do it now because i wanna so thanks for the free idea tear or is it mr zoo yeah whatever so first of all what is the pokers it is a virus uh probably the lore isn't that clear on whether it's actually a virus or not but it is a microorganism of some kind it's contagious passing from pokemon to pokemon if one of your pokemon has it there is a small chance that it will pass to another pokemon in your party a pokemon can very rarely like three in 65 536 times catch it after a battle ends that is a .0046 chance of catching it in the wild this means that it's either not highly contagious which is likely or it's highly rare which is also likely or it's both which is you know extremely likely anyway for context the chances of encountering a shiny pokemon is one in 8192 or about .012 percent making finding a shiny pokemon over two and a half times more likely than catching the pokers which is good right less chances of getting a pokemon virus well no that is actually terrible news why because the pokerus freaking rules a pokemon that catches the pokey risk gains effort values at a doubled rate which in order to understand what the heck that means i'm gonna have to explain ev training no tanya not ev training ev training good grief okay so let's take a random pokemon actually yeah no let's make it actually random i'm gonna use randompokemon.com to give me something actually completely random come on big money no whammies and i got coffee grigas cafe grigas all right hold on i literally have no idea what this pokemon is just give me a sec okay it was introduced in gen 5 evolves from yamask at level 34 pokedex entry says it has been said that they swallow those who get too close and turn them into mummies they like to eat gold nuggets they pretend to be elaborate coffins to teach lessons to grave robbers their bodies are covered in pure gold grave robbers who mistake them for real coffins and get too close end up trapped inside their bodies there are many depictions of coffee grigas decorating ancient tombs they're symbols of the wealth that kings of bygone eras had neat good stuff all right so uh where were we oh right eevee training okay cafe regis let's take a look at an average level 100 coffee grigas we're going to ignore ivs for y'all who are super into this this is not an eevee training guide cool your jets a little bit okay so at level 100 coffee grigas will have six stats hp attack defense special attack special defense and speed with values of 226 94 265 175 193 and 58 respectively just at a glance you can assume a few things cafe griegas has high health high resistance physical attacks packs a punch like a like a me and is reasonably strong at attacking with essentially pokemon magical attacks also it's just overall pretty resilient so at level 100 this is the best that our coffee greece can get right well there's no more levels to be gained ergo there's no possible way to improve this pokemon stats wrong dead wrong this is where ev training comes in ev training short for effort value training is a way of improving your pokemon stats without being shackled to the leveling system yeah leveling your pokemon does increase their stats but you can push them even further than that you may have experienced this a little with pokemon vitamins which will instantly and permanently boost a stat for essentially free but these do have a limit you can only use vitamins to increase stats by a total of 100 which is already pretty impressive it means you can theoretically boost any stat by a hundred you can take that paltry 94 attack and turn it into a 194 attack making your pokemon more well-rounded or you can boost the defense from 265 to 365 picking something that was already formidable against physical attacks nearly impenetrable but this is just scratching the surface of the min maxing that's possible in the pokemon games which brings us back to effort values effort values were the system that was put in place in pokemon well a lot of people say that it was introduced in ruby and sapphire but some form of it has existed in the pokemon games going all the way back to generation one but the system there was way more complicated and less fun anyway in the current system you can boost your stats by way way more than this initial 100 from vitamins by how much over 500 total 510 to be exact so how do you get this extra 410 points after shoving a bunch of pills in your pokemon by fighting other pokemon let's pit our coffee grigas against another uh let's use our randomizer again okay so we're in a pokemon battle and a wild baniri has appeared excellent cafes use hyperbeam what you think what what it's overkill just just do it i'm the pokemon master here nuke it with hyperbeam okay we've knocked out bun eri nice i'm sure there will be no consequences to putting a wild animal in a coma surrounded by its natural predators after zapping it with a laser beam battle's over and boom we've gained an effort value point one to be precise according to bulbapedia banerys are worth one effort value point in the speed stat meaning each one we kill knock out our coffee grigas will gain one point to their speed stat and that's it that is ev training you can boost the pokemon stats by over 500 points just by playing the game there's an entire list of pokemon out there with different effort value rewards so just find a place with a ton of pokemon in it that have the stat you want to grind and begin the mass extermination let's take our hypothetical coffee grigas with his base stats and up them to 240 hp 94 attack 427 defense 317 special attack 339 special defense and 104 speed making them a literal tank thick as heck armor with a cannon strapped to its head all of this accomplished through ev training and basically doubles the potential power of any given pokemon and what does this have to do with pokerus everything poker us has one single side effect that we know of it doubles the evs pokemon received from battle making it a highly prized infection among the world's most serious pokemon trainers essentially halving the amount of time they have to spend ev training otherwise that beniri from earlier that only gave me one speed point now it gives two and that's it that's everything you need to know and the thing is as tirzu pointed out to me ages ago this makes no freaking sense a contagious disease that is purely beneficial and is purely a virus really that cannot possibly be possible can it well let's find out because the answer may surprise you interestingly beneficial viruses do exist they're known as mutualistic viruses and the more you know about the micro cosmos of your body the less surprising this should be between one to three percent of your body is actually not you it's other things other creatures you're carrying around with you meaning if you weigh 170 pounds like i do hashtag dad bods unite as much as five pounds of your body is viruses bacteria and fungi living on you and in you most of them are utterly harmless and several of them are actually beneficial bacteria plays a key role in mammal digestion for example helping to break down things in your intestines into more easily absorbed forms things you're eating that would otherwise just pass through you are turned into useful materials by the things living inside you this is why going on rounds of antibiotics can give you severe indigestion it will literally wipe out the beneficial mutualistic bacteria in your gut making your food harder to digest what's more this bacteria in your gut doesn't just eat your food they also reduce the chances of infection in your body either by starving out other organisms that would use your waste to multiply and produce an infection or a toxic upspike in chemicals or outright eating harmful bacteria but why don't you always get super sick with an antibiotic resistant infection every time you go on antibiotics because that's where viruses come in when antibiotics kill off the beneficial bacteria in your gut this allows viruses to thrive specifically viruses known as bacteriophages which are viruses that prey on bacteria these things are everywhere and they literally could not care less about your health what they care about is replicating and they do it very well usually phages are designed adapted to prey on very specific bacteria meaning they'll leave things like your beneficial bacteria in your guts alone because they've just not adapted to attack them but when the bacteria that have been keeping harmful bacteria at bay suddenly gets wiped off the face of the earth from antibiotics this becomes an all you can eat buffet to those bacteriophages and they will go to town inserting their biological information into these bacteria that would turn your body into a living war zone replicating inside them and exploding out by the millions to infect and kill more a huge spike in viral bacteriophages has been documented in patients that go on strong antibiotics and it's a large reason why antibiotics presently don't immediately kill us due to malnutrition secondary infections or spikes and toxins pretty cool stuff so what the poke rust is just a bacteriophage that lives in the pokemon gut flora well nah probably not for one thing these phages have no noticeable symptoms positive or negative on our bodies they just maintain the status quo and what's more they're not really contagious you don't catch them from other people or animals they just kind of exist in you already in small numbers what's more in order for bacteriophages to make pokemon faster stronger smarter and healthier in the way that the pokeris does it'd mean there'd have to be some sort of bacteria living inside the pokemon which was actively making them dumber and slower and weaker which i guess is a possibility but that sounds like a pandemic to me someone should look into that so what does this mean that the pokeris is inviable that it's not a virus and it couldn't exist oh absolutely not for example viral infections have been key in evolution in messing with our dna and some viruses have been shown to have developmental benefits on rats this does not explain the pokers at all nothing on earth can make things faster stronger and smarter well almost nothing nothing natural but when you get into the world of gene therapy all bets are off and what's a key component of gene therapy viruses [Music] using tools like crispr which i can't explain in detail here gene therapy uses viruses to basically fix dna this is because viruses are perfectly adapted for this task virus's entire jam is invading cells and twisting them for our own uses before moving on to another cell and doing the same thing they can do this by essentially snipping off dna and replacing it with another floating piece that's nearby i know it seems like it should be more complicated than that and it is but it also kind of isn't that's how it works meaning while a virus could never randomly evolve to just make pokemon better one could be designed to and it could be designed to be contagious or it could just happen to be contagious by mistakes someone drops a vial in a lab oopsy poopsy now it's out there and what's more gene therapy actually explains everything because after the pokemon cures the pokeris after a few days you know what doesn't go away they're double evs that's right even after a pokemon has no trace of the virus left in their body their bodies are still getting the benefits meaning it wasn't the actual infection giving them this advantage rather the infection was unlocking this accelerated growth rate in pokemon the pokey risk goes into the body rewrites all the dna to allow a pokemon to grow faster and smarter and then moves on or dies after the dna is rewritten there's nothing else to do but the pokemon already has its dna rewritten so it remains powerful more capable forever it's essentially the forced evolutionary virus from fallout but it doesn't mutate pokemon into giant monsters unfortunately that would actually rule so next time when you're out trying to catch the poke rust remember it was designed by some lab somewhere probably some lab that made mewtwo they're all about gene tampering stuff and just pray it doesn't evolve into some sort of zombie virus or something that makes your pokemon want to eat your brains sincerely austin p.s also there is a fun fact a lively debate in the scientific community about whether or not viruses are considered alive or not this is because viruses while clearly organic in nature fail to check the boxes that many other organisms do viruses aren't made up of cells like many other organisms rather it's a virion they don't reproduce like other organisms they don't grow they don't use energy in the same way they don't have the same genetic wholeness as other organisms so uh what do you think are viruses alive are they something else debate down in the comments section after you read a few articles on it first it is wild stuff and i want to give a personal shout out to my patreon patrons matthew ridge isb ronald coleman alan hagers edit edidamtb nicholas splinger marissa resnick and mazer if you guys make this show possible i love you so much and have a good one [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,192,200

Rating: 4.8665671 out of 5

Keywords: pokemon, pokemon virus, pokerus, pikachu, ash ketchum, pokemon sword and shield, pokemon journeys, pokemon crown tundra, pokemon go, pokemon sword and shield crown tundra, pokemon sword and shield episode, pokemon sword and shield episode 50, pokemon cafe, pokemon sword, pokemon shield, pokemon episode, pokemon full episode, the science, the science of pokemon, pokemon movie, pokemon song, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory pokemon, pokémon, pokemon cards

Id: NhWLUgfgUQA

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021