The Great Influenza The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

There's this guy named John M. Berry and he is a not Embery by the way his middle initial is M and his last name is Barry. He is an historian and he wrote a book called The Great Influenza and he wrote an article based on his research called How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America.

There's this guy named John M. Berry and he is a not Embery by the way his middle initial is M and his last name is Barry. He is an historian and he wrote a book called The Great Influenza and he wrote an article based on his research called How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America.

There's this guy named John M. Berry and he is a not Embery by the way his middle initial is M and his last name is Barry. He is an historian and he wrote a book called The Great Influenza and he wrote an article based on his research called How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America.

The best thing that I read that helped me during COVID was John M. Barry's book, The Great Influenza, which was published in 2005 about the Spanish flu.

I read a book and I got out the other day, looking at it. It was on the Spanish flu of 1918, uh, called the great influenza.

And, um, by coincidence, I came by Fort Riley, Texas or Kansas back in, uh, December. I was with Zach from CZ and his wife, she's an environmental engineer for Kansas light and power. And as we drove by the military base, I says, I am pretty sure that is where the Spanish flu started the epidemic.

And that's where it was first recognized. And then it swept the world, just killing millions upon millions of people.

And, um, I said, it was very intriguing. I grew up in a small community when I was a kid, there was three sets of orphans all about the same age, 40 to there's probably 50 years old, somewhere in that timeframe. I don't know a single orphan from then or from now, but after I read that book in 2005, I did a timeline and their parents evidently died from the Spanish flu.

And that's what, that's what the Spanish flu it, uh, it, uh, concentrated on people of child bearing ages.

If you'd like to learn more about the Spanish influenza, we recommend a great book we drew on for this episode. The Great Influenza, the Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Berry.

This was brought up by John Berry who wrote the book, The Great Flu.

And he talked about the cases that he looked at where people were absolutely like the mental gymnastics people had to go through where they were watching people die from this flu and they were watching people who lived get such high fevers that they, when they came back, they weren't the person they were before.

We literally went to every cabinet secretary with John Barry's book on the 1918 pandemic and sat with them highlighted in yellow the passages that we felt were the most important for them to pay attention to

I'm not a person that focuses on blame I'm a focus that's looking for learning and watching for evidence that as we experiment with what's the right thing to do we bring the best smartest people together to advise us and we observe what happens and we listen and pay attention to how it impacts people and we try to adapt and adjust as we go forward

I have John Barry's book sitting right next to me went back to read the 1918 influenza story because there's so much in there to learn from that has applicability today

We literally went to every cabinet secretary with John Barry's book on the 1918 pandemic and sat with them highlighted in yellow the passages that we felt were the most important for them to pay attention to so that for example the secretary of transportation understood that transportation had a role in a pandemic commerce understood its role state department understood its role and really tried to get all of government to come together and plan and exercise and prepare and invest.

I'm not a person that focuses on blame I'm a focus that's looking for learning and watching for evidence that as we experiment with what's the right thing to do we bring the best smartest people together to advise us and we observe what happens and we listen and pay attention to how it impacts people and we try to adapt and adjust as we go forward

I have John Barry's book sitting right next to me went back to read the 1918 influenza story because there's so much in there to learn from that has applicability today

We literally went to every cabinet secretary with John Barry's book on the 1918 pandemic and sat with them highlighted in yellow the passages that we felt were the most important for them to pay attention to

I'm not a person that focuses on blame I'm a focus that's looking for learning and watching for evidence that as we experiment with what's the right thing to do we bring the best smartest people together to advise us and we observe what happens and we listen and pay attention to how it impacts people and we try to adapt and adjust as we go forward

I have John Barry's book sitting right next to me went back to read the 1918 influenza story because there's so much in there to learn from that has applicability today

George W. Bush tells a story where he read The Great Influenza and called Fran Townsend and basically says we've got to do something potentially about the risk of a pandemic.

The Great Influenza, a book that I read at the beginning of the pandemic taught me much more about how to spend the last 15 months than, you know, any breaking news story because the news story has never really changed anything.

During COVID, I raved about this book, The Great Influenza by John Embary, who I've had on the podcast. Fascinating book. I read this great book.

the best book I read during COVID was John Embarry's book The Great Influenza right so you're reading about the Spanish flu and you're like okay here's everything that's true right

I remember at the start of the pandemic crap you'll probably know the book about the Spanish flu yeah the great influenza by John and Barry yeah so I was reading that book and it's the same like down to the freaking masking like all of it is the same

the great influenza a book that I read at the beginning of the pandemic taught me much more about how to spend the last 15 months than you know any breaking news story because the news stories never really changed anything.

You know, you can, you could have followed one of Donald Trump's impeachment or you could have read a biography of Nixon or Andrew Johnson. You know, it's better to go back further. It's better to look deeper. You may even learn more from something fictional than you at like you could, you could learn as much from Camus the plague as you could from, you know, the latest New York Times report.

if you haven't read a great influenza yet, you should, it's incredible.

one book I highly recommend it to everyone was James M. Barry's The Great Influenza.

I recommended the Great Influenza, right? What he talked about a hundred years ago and that pandemic would have been quite familiar to Marcus and really is in the Antonin plague.

I was talking to John Embarry who wrote the great influenza

I don't know why I never read The Great Influenza the story of the deadliest pandemic in history but I did read it in March 2020 in those early days of lockdown and was just fucking blown away. It's an incredible book.

If you read it, you could have consumed zero news over the last three years, spent zero time talking about the pandemic, learning about the pandemic and just read this book and don't effectively exactly what to do.

All the mistakes policymakers would make, all the mistakes people would make, all the things to be worried about, the things not to be worried about, basically everything you would need to do, you could have learned from this book

the great influenza a book that i read at the beginning of the pandemic taught me much more about how to spend the last 15 months than you know any breaking news story because the news stories never really change anything it's like hey this thing is real here's the scientific advice take it seriously wait for it to be over right the latest report is only adding to what we already know for the most part

you could read a book about the Spanish flu which I recommended a bunch of times if you haven't read a great influenza yet you should it's incredible.

if you haven't read the great influenza you should

I think you want to let's like read John Berry's The Great Influenza to understand what's happening today as opposed to reading Alex Berencens nonsense tweets about it right like who you want to you want to study the past to help you understand the future

the great influenza a book that I read at the beginning of the pandemic taught me much more about how to spend the last 15 months than you know any breaking news story because the news stories never really changed anything it's like hey this thing is real here's the scientific advice take it seriously wait for it to be over right

Yes, I have. Yeah, incredible book.

It is an incredible book.

And, you know, it's fascinating that, you know, what came out of that, right? Like it led directly to the discovery of DNA and, you know, all this sort of stuff.

If you're, you know, as far as like late people books, that's one of the best ones, you know, to understand what happens in a pandemic and, you know, what can happen with in this case with the flu and, you know, the first world war.

I was uh i've talked about um john emberry's book the great influenza which is an incredible book that i think everyone should have read at the beginning of this pandemic