Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to

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possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here,

please consider becoming one. I am here with Michael Osterholm.

Michael, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So you have written an alarming book titled The Big One, How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics.

You co-wrote that with Mark Olshaker.

And we're going to get into that.

I mean, obviously we're, I think, as a presage to your book, I mean, actually your book

accomplishes much of this as well.

I think we should do a bit of a post-mortem on the COVID pandemic and what we've learned

or failed to learn from that experience.

That was as bad as that was, that was a kind

of dress rehearsal for the thing you're imagining, which would be quite a bit worse. Before we jump in,

what is your scientific background and what are your responsibilities as an epidemiologist at this

point? Well, I actually was fortunate enough to know when I was in seventh grade, I wanted to become

a medical detective.

It turned out that someone in my small Iowa farm town actually subscribed to the New Yorker.

And at that time, there were a series of articles in there by Burton Rogey, which were medical whodunnits,

basically kind of the CDC versions of these outbreaks. And when I read that, I said, this is what I want to do.

So when I graduated from undergraduate, I immediately went to graduate school at the University of

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