I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now.

This weekend, I got my flu shot, and that got me on the topic of influenza.

And it occurred to me, we have this incredible conversation from several years ago with

John Barry, author of the New York Times

bestseller, The Great Influenza, the story of the deadliest pandemic in history. And now

might be a good time to air this again to remind everyone, go get your flu shots. But as I was

thinking about it, one of the things I've always thought about doing with the show is when we do

re-airs, kind of cut together different themes from different episodes in a way that creates kind of one super episode.

And so as I was listening back to this episode, I thought there's some great stuff from our live show in 2019 with Aaron Welsh, a co-host of this podcast will kill you, an epidemiologist, and I thought, hey, let's make a

super episode and spread awareness and also just bind together the history of epidemics in one

episode that features an author and historian. And on the other end, how does history serve

someone who does something completely different than historians do. So I'm very pleased to

share this two-part episode with you, the supercut on the history of infectious disease. And I hope

that this is not relevant for you right now and that you stay well throughout this flu season.

In other news, this last week, I took a trip out to Western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee

to do some relief work, spent about three days out there helping clean up, gut a house, helped

move some things around. Friends, with our current news cycle and the election and everything,

sometimes these things go, they come on your radar and then

they just kind of go away. Let me tell you that part of this world is in need right now,

and especially in need of people who can come up there and actually do the work.

One of the major problems they have right now is just not enough housing.

So if you know somebody up there, I was fortunate enough to have some friends, my friends Autumn and Justin, let me stay with them. If you've got the time, if you've got the energy, I know not everybody does, but if you can take some days up there, I know they'd appreciate it. The people that we were helping out, they've only got a few weeks left in a hotel, and after that, they've got nowhere to go. And that's, that's so many people up there. So it's definitely a

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