Doomed to Fail - Ep 74 - Get Your 'Blood's Worth': The Great Fire of London

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Travel back to 1666 London with us! Houses are made of wood and dangerously close together. The summer was intensely dry, and a gale-force wind was coming in from the East. It's the night of September 2, and a baker on Pudding Lane forgot to put out his oven.The bell was rung, but a series of non-decisions by politicians and the rush to evacuate let the fire burn down 5/6th of the city.We're getting started with fire disasters - join us! Sources:Samuel Pepys | Royal Museums Greenwich🎧 The Great Fire of London - History HitThe Great Fire of London: Rats, Disease, and Uncontrolled Fires Tormenting the English in 1666 by Kelly Mass, Doug Greene | 2940175354493 | Audiobook (Digital) | Barnes & Noble® Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back and firmly in 2024. Hi, Taylor. Hello. Has it been the best 24 for you? It's been the best.

Just the best. I am very excited about this year. It is going to be a presidential year. which is always fun because politics is entertainment and we like that. I know. I love it. That's serious topics are now subject to sound bites and TikTok clips. That's actually pretty good.

I know. Cool. So welcome to do to fail. I'm Forrest, joined here by Taylor and we are a podcast about the ever-evolving topic of what to cover on a day-to-day basis. although it generally has a tragic concept to it or a forlorn element to it or something along those lines. So, you know, as we iterate, just let us know if anything is resonating at all. Anything at all is resonating. We'll take it.

Whatever you got. Sounds good. Sounds good. So I covered the lovely and toxic Salton C earlier this week. We are moving on to a topic that Taylor has chosen, which I do not know at all. so I'll kick it over to you, Taylor. Awesome. So I said water is our through line,

and I'm definitely going to be drinking water as my themed drink during this one because I want to talk about fire and a historical fire. There's a bunch of big ones, but this one I'm not going to make you guess because I just feel like there's a lot of historical fires and I don't know, do you know any?

Chicago and San Francisco. Neither of those. It's in Europe. It is the Great Fire of London in 1666. Taylor, can I give you another through line? Yeah. So with a Salton Sea episode, if the San Francisco fire hadn't happened, then they probably would have blocked it up in the Salton Sea never would have existed

because there was a dredge they needed to dig out the canal and they couldn't get it because the whole city was burning down. Oh my God, I can't wait for the water wars. It's going to be real great, real fun, run that maxi around here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fun. So have you ever watched, this is funny me, have you watched Tacoma FD?

It's on, it's on HBO and it's going to be on Netflix soon. No. It's great. It is by the Broken Lizard guys who do like Beer Fest and Super Troopers. Yeah. And they're amazing. And I just wanted to shout out because I really love it. So I've been learning a lot about, I've been watching this fireman show.

We've watched the whole thing twice. It's just really, really funny. So shout out to that show. But today I'm going to talk about the Great Fire of London. It destroyed five, sixth of London. So most of it. It's a big swath. Big swath.

So first, to talk about firefighting and fire dependent societies. So we're so lucky that we don't have to have an open flame constantly in our homes. Like most of the world were history. Like you had candles and you had fire and it was just so dangerous and there was so much fire around. Like I have a gas stove and matches just in case there's an emergency. but, like, I don't have a fire constantly. As soon as it gets dark outside, I don't need to, like, light a hundred candles, you know? I've been lighting candles this week because I like them.

That's different than, like, needing them, you know? It's true. But also, remember if the Zappos guy died in that, like, shed lighting candles and drinking vodka? Wait, the Zappos guy's dead? Yeah, like, the guy who had, like, started Zappos, he died and, like, because he loved expensive candles and vodka, and he was, like, in someone's shed and like fire is dangerous is part of my point still is but we're not dependent on my god you're right he did die yeah isn't horrible he died in the shed yeah it was like in like the hamptons was in a housefire in new london connecticut nobody knew who he was because he was burned to a

crisp but he became trapped in a pool shed during the fire oh my god my my table stand is moving like your chair is going down. Isn't that awful? So yeah, fires continues to be very dangerous if you're not careful. He was 47 years old. Can you imagine being like a billionaire, 47 years old, like, God. Yeah, absolutely horrible. So yeah, so fire still super, super dangerous. Also, it's really dark. And so there is like another book that, a book that I have called The Invention of Murder that I've read part of. And it starts off talking about like Victorian England, but like, a as soon as it got dark, it was dark. People would, like, get lost in the streets all the time.

You know, like, you couldn't see anything in a lot of these places. Like, as soon as it was dark, so you had to have candles constantly. And, like, the street lamps were fires, all those things. Yeah. And so even now, my mom was talking about it. We're all getting this Instagram ad for a fire blanket to, like, put over your stove if it catches on fire, to, like, can you go out? Because, like, we don't even know how to use our fire extinguishers. Like, we should remember how to use those.

But for most of history, everything could have caught on fire. And people, as cities began to build, obviously people living closer and closer, and there's way more chance that everything's going to go up in flames. And then also, water, this is like our through line. Water is really heavy. It's hard to get water places. Even when they have those big forest fires, you can't just, like, douse it with water. It just, like, doesn't happen.

And I did look up because I wasn't sure what it was that, you know how planes drop that, like, pink stuff on forest fires. That's actually a chemical called FOSCHEC, P-H-O-S-Fose-Cech. It's a fertilizer-based liquid, and it coats the vegetation in a fire-resistant layer. That's not to put out the fire. That's to stop the fire from going any further.

And there's also, like, yeah, and there's also a ton of stuff that, like, you know, some things are controlled burns and some things need to be, you know, set on fire to be able to, like, have the land grow and all those things. But it's really hard to put out, like, a huge fire is part of the point and they can just put a wildly small amount of water on it at a time yeah you don't put a

you don't put a fire out you exhaust its ability to keep firing exactly exactly so let's talk about how we've done that like around history so i have a little bit of like a history of firefighting in ancient rome there were volunteers who would use um they would watch out for fires so like And all these stories, like before communication systems, you know, someone would like ring a bell and be like, there's a fire over here and people would like come and like try to help. So they started doing that in ancient Rome. Obviously they did it before. In medieval Europe, there was fire brigades, which are also mostly volunteers. And they used like buckets of water. There was some like spraying devices that they had. But they had to like fill carts with water and like get it to the fire. You know. Do you know? And then also this is when a. around the medieval times is they started to do hook and ladders. Have you heard like a hook and ladder company for like a fire thing? No, but I can assume it's a ladder that has a hook on it,

that you can like settle on things, right? That's what I thought it was, but it's actually not. So like a ladder, obviously is a ladder, but the hooks are for pulling buildings down around the fire. So as soon as like a house catches on fire, the hook is made to pull the houses around it down. So the fire cannot spread like you were something. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. Wait, so if my neighbor's house caught fire, they would destroy my house? Yes. That seems a little harsh. It sucks. But, like, you'd have to do because your house is so close together, you know. That's why you got to move this exodus where nothing is close to anything. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, especially, like, I'll tell you a little bit about how the houses looked like in 1666, but they were just, like, unbelievably close together. There were also, like, bucket brigades. I'm sure you've heard of that where you like pass a bucket down and do that. I mean, it takes forever, but it's still like it happens. Formal fire departments started to come in like the late, late 1600s because of this. The first fire department in the United States was founded in Boston in 1678.

In the 19th century, you know, the steam power to fire engines were really helpful. And then obviously now you have like your gigantic fire truck can carry it hook up to the sewer system and do all those things. right i don't think that's sewer water that they support the sewer system but like you know like the it's the same thing like the that's what's called it's called the sewer system the waters the sewer's full of shit they're not taking ship water out of hydrants and then put pouring you know when you're connected to like the city water it's like the city water but it's the same company is the sewer are you are the impression that when you turn on like a faucet in your house that is also connected to your septic think no it's just that i think it's all the kind of the same thing taylor's googling

is in fire hens i think it's like the same thing at the very worst it's like gray water it's just it's regular drinking water but it comes from the whole system of water like the sewer system isn't separate from the water system it's the same group that does it let's let's carry on okay i don't care um anyway we're gonna be stuck on this topic So another thing that came out of this was actually the invention of fire insurance. The first insurance company in London was the fire office that was established in 180 and it is the origin of moderate insurance because they didn't really have that before this. But then they started to like do that.

And they would do things obviously that like is super fucked up like houses that were insured would have like a little mark on them so that firefighters were prioritized those houses over other houses it's still fucked up like insurance is like such a scam like if something goes wrong they will never pay or take forever to pay but yeah god forbid you don't make it i mean not that i've ever missed the pain but like still i would assume if i missed a payment it would raise hell about it yeah totally totally um i mean we had a guy come when we had a leak in our roof and he gave us a good quote but you know it was paining the ass wait with your insurance company Mm-hmm.

So you call the insurance company and then they sent somebody? Mm-hmm. Yeah, get your own quote. They're going to send someone cheap. No, no, no, no. They sent a guy to look at it and then they sent us money to pay for it however we wanted to. No, fun. Okay.

Well, you have good insurance. I do. So anyway, so we're in London. So that's kind of like the history of firefighting. It's obviously hard. And as cities are being built, it's getting harder. In 1666 in London, it is a restoration period. King Charles II has just been crowned.

He's a new king. And right before this, Oliver Cromwell had been in charge of England, but he wasn't a king. And he had been in charge of killing Charles, not in charge of order of the people who had signed the death order over Charles I first. So all this stuff that I don't know, but it's tense. And people think that, like, the Cromwellians are going to come back and, like, fight for power. So it's still, like, tense politically. They're also just out of the plague. because the plague killed a shit ton of people

and it's still around some people claim that the fire is the thing that stopped it for good because it burned down and it killed a bunch of rats obviously but people it was already kind of waning down and people were starting to recover from it

but that had been like obviously super traumatic a ton of people had died you know England was in the middle of two wars they were fighting the French because they were always fighting the French and also the Dutch so there was like that going on

and London itself was growing so fast. It was like the fastest growing city in the world. There were different parts like Westminster wasn't officially a part of London, but it like became a part of London. It was a lot of sprawl going out. There was still the Roman wall around a lot of it because the Romans left in 400, but the wall was still there. That's crazy.

Yeah. And like remember how they left and then English didn't know how to fix anything, so everything just kind of collapsed because they, They, like, didn't know how to do the, how to fix aqueducts. They didn't know how to maintain the wall. They didn't know how to do anything else. So they just kind of, like, collapsed into the Middle Ages. Jeez.

Because Romans left. So, but London is huge. So there's anywhere between, like, 250 and 450,000 people in the city, which is pretty major. And there's also a ton of people that are in and out of the city during the day to, like, trade and do things. So it's very, very busy. There are pipes that run water through the city, but it is not, like, a modern, like, pipe system. The houses have a lot of, they're made out of wood, have a lot of thatched roofs. And this is when like they rebuild it a lot in stone, but it started off being, you know,

made of wood. And they're also growing in a way that like, have you ever seen a picture of an old house that has like a smaller first floor than the second or third floors? Oh, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. Did we like just talk about that about there was a house you showed me like an old house it would have been in someone's family for like a thousand years and the bottom was like just narrow little thing

and the top was like this big old I don't remember but if I looked at the house for myself I don't know yeah but you can picture it and so like what that meant was so they were trying to like

get more space obviously so they would build up and they would build out so in the middle of the roads the houses we're getting closer and closer where you could like shake your neighbor's hand

through a bedroom window over the street that's kind of fun I would like to live there Um, but it's not fun because it's gross and really dark. Why is it gross? You know, like, because there's poop everywhere because it's 1666. And there's like, you know, because there's poop everywhere.

And there's also like, so there's no, you know, there's no sewer system. There's no way to get the poop out. The poop everywhere. It smells bad. Obviously, history smells terrible. And it's really, really crowded in. There's no fresh air, you know, because there's no fresh air. You can barely see the sky when you're on the street.

in the middle of the day. Yeah, it's not great. I always wonder how people back then were intimate because, like, it sounds disgusting. Like, it is... It's like you have a UTI constantly. It'd be so gross. Yeah, yeah, I don't...

Yeah, it's all up all bad. Yeah, no, totally. No one was taking showers. I mean, that's not part of the story, but, yeah, but it was, like, very crowded in most of the city. So the houses are getting closer and closer. They're all made of wood. It's also the summer of 1666 was very, very dry.

It was like the driest summer on record, so everything is dry in this whole city. And then also, it's really windy. So this is the beginning of September, 1666. On September 1st, the King's brother is in the Anglo-Dutch War off at sea, and he's going to get into a battle with the Dutch. and it's so windy they both both sides just leave they can't even fight like they're just like it was just so windy like the boats were going crazy like all this huge storm on the sea so that wind from september 1st is moving towards london and it gets there around 1 a.m on september 2nd 1666 got it got it so the fire began in the beginning of in the middle of the night and it ravaged the city for like four to five days it started in a bakery owned by a man named Thomas Fariner on Pudding Lane, which is adorable. It's where all the bakers were. Oh, my God.

That's so cute. I know. And it was probably someone forgetting to put up the fire, which happened all the time. So this is like the Swiss cheese model that we talk about of like things that have to go wrong. So like it's really fucking dry. This wind is like a huge wind that they haven't seen in a really long time. And someone in the bakery forgets to turn off the oven.

Yeah. and so there starts to be the fire starts in the bakery of Thomas's house and so he obviously lives on the top floor and so him and his family go to the top floor and they escape to their neighbor's house via that top window that's really close to each other but their maid is afraid of heights and she won't go and she's the first person to die in the Great Fire of London which is very good time yeah um so right now the thing to do would have been to grab the hooks and pull down the houses around the bakery you know like that would be the answer and then it would stop burning and they do that all the time in london there's fires all the time you know or houses that flimsily belt built that you could just poke it with a stick well like i think so it's like wood i don't think like putting it with a stick i think you're like hooking it out to the top and like pulling it down the group of people i think okay because I was in Ireland, I was like amazed at like the buildment quality of things.

Everything there was like 7,000 years old. And you look at it and it's like still standing and it is, it looks impenetrable. So I guess you have like weaken it and like structurally before you can do any of that stuff. Yeah, I'm sure there's like other things that they did. But like the hook was to pull it down. And that was like, like you said earlier, that's like the way to stop the fire is stop, give it nowhere to go. Yeah. And that way you can stop it.

I mean, do that all the time. But the problem is that in this part of London and in most of, London, most of the houses were rentals. So the person who owned the house didn't live in it. They rented it to someone else. So when the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, who was a guy in charge of London, he was called to make a decision. And he said, it's not that bad. Just let it burn out. Don't tear down any of the houses because we can't find the owners because the owners aren't physically there. It's just people who are renting the houses. So to save the properties, allegedly he's like let's just leave it and he goes back to bed it's like one in the

morning he leaves and so everybody else is just like watching this fire happen and they can't do anything about it because they're not allowed to tear down the houses that they would usually do so the city did have some fire breaks which were like places where there was that space between it but they weren't enough to contain this fire there was also a shit ton of flammable stuff in the city. They had just they're coming in and out of wars all the time. So there's like storehouses of gunpowder all over, you know,

and things that are like primed to explode in different places. Not good. No. So there's also a lot of like books and papers and things that are like really highly flammable. Everything's made out of out of wood.

We know a lot about this from a man named Samuel Pepys. He was a noble man who knew the king. and he wrote a journal and so his journals you can like read now it goes like his day to day and he watched it happen from across the Thames and he was like why aren't they pulling things down like this is getting bigger and bigger I can see this happening so he went to the king because he knew the king and he told the king you have to start turning these buildings down and the king said yes and like over overrode the mayor so they were finally able to start pulling things down um

your question are we just going to like gloss over the fact that the mayor of Brandon's name was Bloodworth. Pretty, that's a pretty cool name. Like, it sounds like he brushes his teeth with battle axes. I know. I think actually he's kind of lame, unfortunately. So he doesn't live up to his name because he could have, like, been a hero. He definitely is not the hero in this story. Looking out for like a few landowners instead of like the entire city, which is his job.

Yeah, 100%. So people start fleeing because like this part of the city is very obviously on fire. the official death toll of the Great Fire in London is six which I do not believe there's no way that only six people died yeah because they're not counting orphans maids like yeah

they're not counting the poor people they couldn't count the poor people they didn't have a list you know what I mean like I feel like they probably had like a rudimentary list of people for tax purposes but like there's no way only six people died because people also start to like they could potentially have been cremated because this fire

in the center was so hot and there's like a piece of pottery that that um was found like in the center of it like you're like you know later by like archaeologists and like that piece is was heated up to like 2,000 degrees like crazy people could have just disappeared you know and I'm sure they did because so and people would do things like they would move their things a mile away so I'd be like I'm going to bring myself over to your house Fars and then the fire would get to your house and we'd be like shit and we like move our stuff again so people were like moving their things and they were really focused on like saving their property and their physical things rather than putting out of the fire,

like a lot of people were. So there were also then carts and boats that were up in their prices to bring people out of the city. So like being like, you know, where it usually would cost like, you know, 30, like 30 bucks for an Uber. Now it's $6,000 adjusted to our time. So like people are really taking advantage of other people. And there's a big jam at all the gates of the city because some carts are trying to get

in to get in on this good deal and everyone else is trying to get out. So there's a lot of like that where I'm sure people died in that like melee, you know, like people are panicking and then getting out. So and of course also there was looting. You know, people were like, you know, stealing stuff from houses like as they burned down. There were also, there's also, I'm sure, a ton of human stuff like assaults and panic and like things that, you know, no one wrote down because they died. So I'm sure there's like a lot more people that died. At one point, all of of the booksellers moved their books to the crypt in St. Paul's Cathedral because it was made of stone. They were like, we'll move all of our books into this crypt so that they'll

be safe. But the ceiling, the roof was wood and the wooden roof caught on fire, collapsed into the cathedral, into the crypt, and all the books went on fire. So it was just like a fireball of all the paper. Yeah. So all that's happening. The Royal Exchange is gone. That's like the bank. And then, of course, people start to be like what happened how did this happen whose fault is this and of course they start blaming bloodworth yes uh no immigrants oh of course not going to blame bloodworth we're going to name josepie um so they are like in the middle of it which i totally understand because i have been in the middle of a terrorist attack and you don't know what's going on you know and but people were like Is this a terrorist attack?

They had actually just burned some Dutch cities. So they're like, is this revenge for the cities that we just burned during this war that we're in? It sparked a huge, obviously, like fear of the other. They were saying that like the baker where it started, he was Dutch. He wasn't, you know, but that rumor started like immediately. They were blaming other people. And then another thing that would happen is like, obviously it's still super, super windy. So sparks in ash and stuff would fly to different parts of the city.

so you see fires starting all over the city in different places and it looks like potentially there could be like an arsonist you know like someone bombing different parts of the city and that's really fucking scary the people start thinking that that's happening i love that back then it was the the terrorist angle was just like they're a slightly different version of like of white than we are like like what is the actual difference that you guys are fighting over dutch and in the british both have terrible food terrible climates like what is it and also like catholics it could have been catholics so we're doing it at this point they hate catholics but that goes back and forth you know over and over again but all of that is happening and this is like a huge thing um also everyone is really tired it's been like three days you can't take a nap in the middle of this you know so like they're not making good decisions they're not prioritizing getting rid of the fire um eventually uh bloodworth is like you know what i'm going to go take a nap i'll be back and he just leaves and they don't see him until after it's over yeah good so but i'd be like fuck this i'm out he just like he

fucked out of there you'd have this city which is now basically just an ash pile exactly the king actually he rode around on his horse giving people money to get people out which is noble right i feel like that's pretty cool it's pretty cool so he was like you know those people who were like jacking up their prices he was like fine i'll pay you just get these people out of here you know so they were trying to get people out but eventually the fire did stop and it stopped because the wind dropped the wind dropped and they used gunpowder that was stored in the tower of london to create those huge fire breaks they had to demolish a lot of like the out outside of it so that it would stop so eventually after like five days it did stop after it was over um it destroyed like i said

five-sixth of the city, approximately 87 churches, 13,200 houses, a bunch of other buildings. And so London had had, you know, like 400,000 people potentially kind of going in and out and out of it and around the whole city. But in, it ended up with being about 70,000 people left homeless and having to go into like refugee camps around the city, which is way too many houses to burn down for only six people to have died. yeah i agree with that and there's a bunch of people that probably killed each other in the refugee camps as you would do there's so much of that going on that we just like don't know about um so people really like wanted to blame something you know they were like who's false is this you know there's all of the things that you know it was it was chance but it like it being chance is really scary and that's i think again what we talk about with the swiss cheese model like it's just fucking chance that all these things went wrong Yeah. So they were like, is this the apocalypse? You know, we just had a plague. We're all, we're in these wars.

You know, we had a drought. Like what is this, is this, are we being punished for something? So people were trying to find like, if is God punishing us, is something I did? Is it something we did as a people? Should we stop being in these wars? Should we stop doing all these things? So people are really like, obviously, everyone was really, really, really traumatized. and they didn't do anything about it.

There was no, like, mental health care. But, like, Samuel Pepys, the guy who wrote the journal about it, him and his wife, like, they didn't sleep for years. They would wake up with, like, terrifying nightmares. And I'm sure he just wrote it down. I'm sure so many people had that, you know, because they never talk about PTSD. I mean, it is, it is terrifying. I accidentally set fire to my house.

Like, I didn't know what was happening. I actually put it on the stove and forgot about it. And then I caught the reflection of like flames. Like not just like a, like a, it's so different. Like a candle wick versus like a fire is just so. I mean, your body goes into I gotta do something, anything. It has to be, it is terrifying. I mean, again, I was in that experience.

I literally picked up hot oil with my bare, like flaming oil. with my bare hands to get rid of the fire because it was like that scared and like my hands were burned to her chris for like weeks and weeks after that but oh my god that's so scary yeah and then like that times a million like imagine it's like watching austin burn down you're like what am i said yeah i would also leave town like yeah totally don't be people do not be a hero take it for me i'm telling you never try to be the hero always escape oh we've talked about that so many times yeah just run curl into a ball out of there.

Throw the vulnerable at the problem and then get out of the situation. Well, don't do that, but you should run. There's a man named Robert Hubert who is, you know how we also talked about how people always confess to crimes that they didn't do?

Yeah. Just for attention. So Robert Hubert was a man. He was Dutch. He said that he did it, that he started it. And he like went to the bakers, like where the bakery was and he was like, I did it here. And the baker signed off on that

guy's execution and he was executed for it but he didn't do it it was an accident you know if he just wants peace i'm going to help he wanted it he's you know he's in the history book so you know um after the fire they wanted to rebuild obviously as fast as possible there's an architect um sir kreft christopher wren he oversaw the rebuilding um he wanted a lot of things to be built out of stone instead of wood, obviously, that helped prevent future large-scale fires. He actually had a new plan, and immediately people had new plans. Like, even while it was burning down, people were going to the king with, like, a new plan for the city. You know, like, they were like, they were already, people wanted to be the architect of the new London, even as it was still burning.

Christopher Wren had a plan to rebuild it, like a little bit more, like have more wider streets, like boulevards, things like that. But people just wanted to get back to their life. so they just rebuilt on their old plots and a lot of the way London is now it was the way that it was them. Like they kept the small lanes and all of that. Wren did redo St. Paul's Cathedral,

which is beautiful and that is still there. And then in when they were building Washington, D.C., they used Wren's plans. So Washington, D.C. is what he had thought London should be like, those big boulevards and, like, streets and stuff. Cool.

Also, London gets to straight again. during World War II. So it's not It's a pretty big target. Yeah. It's always getting destroyed. Today there is a monument. It is a big pillar in the middle of London to as a monument to the fire. It used to say on it burning of this Protestant city began and carried out by the treachery and the malice of the poppish faction, meaning the Catholics did it. That used to say that on the monument, but they chiseled it out in the 18. hundreds because then England went back to be Catholic. Because they had no proof. Yeah, and they obviously was not the Catholics who did it. It's probably the part of the bigger thing is there was no proof that that happens. Yeah.

So that's what shealed out, but the monument is still there. And London is basically, you know, built on the same roads and alleys and plan that it was before then. They just rebuilt on top of it. And they rebuilt it pretty fast. But in like four years, it was like up and running again. But it was obviously a devastating. a devastating fire that I'm sure a lot more people than sex died and most of London was completely flattened. So I have two thoughts. I forgot the first one already.

Perfect. So I have one thought. Let me get to it before I forget. So your story reminded me when you kept talking about chance how that's kind of how every major thing happens is this convergence of issues, it reminded me of something I was reading about the Fukushima nuclear plant. Because as part of designing these things and part of like figuring out like how to like mitigation against disaster, they look at actuaries who put together mobility tables and like in Fukushima's example, like basically for that to have happened, it would have to have a convergence of events that would not be projected to happen over 10,000 years or whatever it was because it would have to have a this magnitude earthquake that would trigger this kind of a tsunami at this depth

to trigger this large of a wave at this feeling all that had to kind of come together and they're like guys we like this is 10,000 year problem this is not a today problem like let's just move on with building this nuclear power plant and the same story here it's like it had all these things that were kind of improbable to happen and kind of come together ended up coming together and i remember the second thing the second thing was i was reading while you were talking that bloodworth if he were to tell them to tear those houses down he would have been personally liable to the owners for repaying to rebuild those houses unless he got the instruction from the king to tear them down so he might not be a villain but he didn't go to the king

and ask. He went back to sleep. Oh, well, there you. Heaps had to go to the king and ask. So someone else had to go to the king. Tell the king has to be taken down. And then he took them down. But also then, like, what is his job if you can't do it anyway? Right, Bloodworth.

I was trying to stick up for you, but you kind of fucked up there. Yeah. I don't know. That's nice of you. But I don't think, I don't think so. I think he's a lot of it. Yeah. Yeah.

Wild times. Cool. Yeah. Wild times in Old Mary London, which I've actually, I'd, been to, I've flown through Gatwick and Heathrow, but I've actually never explored London. That's great. I went there for two weeks in grad school. Um, I lived there, I lived in a hotel, and I did some classes and it was really fun. Oh my God. We had such a good time. Um, and my sister, my brother and I went there one time as well. It's great. It's very lovely. Yeah, I'll go on the

list. Um, sweet Taylor, well, thank you for sharing. Is there anything we want to talk through I have one more listener mail from my friend Agnes, and she said she, what she remembers from seventh grade science about the ozone layer, because we talked about that, remember? Yeah. It was the CFCs, the chloro-fluorocarbons, coroflorocarbons that were in aerosols and in styrofoam plates and things. Like, are you old enough to remember when like McDonald's everything was wrapped in styrofoam? Yes.

It was like particularly bad styrofoam. And then that was the stuff that was in the aerosols. So once they took that out and made the aerosols work differently, the ozone layer kind of fixed itself and it's almost back to normal. Good. So styrofoam was the problem, mostly? Mostly the aerosols, which is so funny because you're like, is people like making their hair really big in the 80s?

Right. Right. Which I love that could potentially be the thing that ends us. Why the fuck not? Why not? Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

Well, thanks for writing in. Yeah, thank you. And anyone else, any thoughts or ideas that you have? Any alternate theories on what caused the Great Fire of London? Any great fires you want to hear about? Let me know. We're going to do a bunch of disasters this year. I'm super excited about. I have two weeks off of work at the moment. So I'm going to just be painting my house and reading books in my ears and hopefully getting a couple weeks prepped. So I'm excited to do that. That is fun. That is fun. I'm excited for you. Thank you. Awesome. Well, we are kicking off 2024 with a bang or a fire and we'll see where the rest of the year takes us. I'm, you know what I was thinking?

And Taylor, I was like, I was just reflecting on the fact like so much crazy stuff happened this year, or I guess last year, 2023. I was thinking about the Titan sub and I was like, you know, at the start of the year, nobody even knew what this was or I remember thinking myself like, wait, you can you can just pay money to go down. It was a whole thing was so new and now. It was just like accepted back. I'm like,

what is going to happen next year? Like, what is, what's coming? What crazy shit are we in for? Yeah, that was, you're right.

Fingers crossed that it's not the end of the world. Hopefully yellow soon doesn't interrupt. But shit, who knows? What kind of, have you seen the videos this week of all the waves in California going like over the peers? No.

I've seen like a bunch of videos. I don't know how like, how prevalent it is, but of, like, people standing on the, like, different piers next to the ocean, and the waves are just, like, coming up and they have to, like, run from them. That's shocking because the peers, like, I'm thinking about, like, the Santa Monica or Malibu or Santa Barbara, like, those piers are huge. Like, they're like. Yeah, it's not those.

It's, like, the smaller, I don't know, but let me look at this up, California. Weaves. So, you know, something's coming, probably. Yeah, what crazy thing is it going to be when it's like, you know, yeah, we could never have predicted that more monster waves will collide with California coasts. Yeah, massive dangerous waves hit California coast this week. 20 foot tall, some as high as 25 feet, with expectations being some as high as 40 are going to impact the area. As high as a telephone pole, which, yeah, I mean, that's as tall. those peers are in Malibu yeah that's real scary I wasn't nervous about those beautiful

beach houses I'm like I don't know I think you're so close to the ocean it's it can kill you in a minute it's worth that yeah doing a heartbeat um sweet well if you have any predictions for next year what the crazy news is I'm gonna play a bit of bingo and say I don't know it's all it's so it's so predictable right like it's a hurricane fires like it's all it'll it'll it'll it's It happens every year. Like, I don't know. There's no big of good. This also reminded me,

one of the saddest things is listening to podcasts from early, like the end of October, um, 20, what was it, 2016 when Trump was first elected. Because everyone's like really excited. And then like the next one,

they're like sad. Like it's like some of the ones I listen to, you know, that they're like, woohoo. And then they're like, so how's it? Yeah.

It's going to be, it's going to be a wild. Well, I do want to shout out, I do want to shout out here over the week. I'm going to do this. I'm going to add this segment. Here of the week, Gypsy Rose, release from prison. Thank God. I have no idea why she was ever even sent to prison.

Like, we should all just give her like a GoFundMe account and just every month deposit money into her GoFundMe because I can't. Like, I was I was just reading about how one of the surgeries I totally forgot about was her having her salvation glands removed. so she literally can't salivate like crazy the abuse she suffered is like unbelievable and we're in prison for it no i'm happy i'm happy for her and she i think she's on social media now like good for her yeah if you want to talk to us gypsy give us a shot we'll do an interview you can definitely be on the show that would change our lives so That would absolutely be like to change. Awesome.

Thanks for us. That's it. Follow us on Instagram, etc. At Doom to FillPod. We have an email list. So every week I put out, I email you what we put out. You can sign up for that via like link a tree. It's on substack.

And send us a note if you have any ideas. Thank you. Perfect. Thanks all. Bye, Taylor. Thank you.