Gone Medieval - The Black Death

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

By the time the Black Death subsided, between 75 and 200 million people in Afro-Eurasia were dead, entire towns and cities had collapsed, and the earth’s temperature cooled.In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, guardDr Eleanor Janega speaks to Professor Philip Slavin who has used cutting-edge techniques to consider exactly where and how the worst pandemic the world has ever seen began, and what that reveals about the medieval world.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's the mid-14th century and Europe is beginning to find its feet again. After a series of terrible famines and in places like England a crushing livestock blight, life is returning to normalcy. The populace, however, is weakened. Years of malnourishment have left bodies emaciated and substantial loss of life has shrunk towns and villages. Little did anyone know that further east, a new and horrifying reality would soon exploit these frailties further.

It's 1345, and a pestilence is raging in the lands of the Golden Horde in what is now southern Russia. For years, the Khan Yanni Begg was attempting to besiege the Crimean city of Kaffa. His efforts were stymied as his men began to drop dead from the mysterious illness. The traders in the city, who hailed from across the Mediterranean, were delighted that they might soon be freed. One way or another, however, the illness found its way over the walls. Gabriel de Musis of Piencenza claimed that the Khan had kick-started this by catapulting the corpses of two of his infected men into the city. As dramatic as that story is, it's also quite possibly false. Regardless, as the newly freed caffins fled the city on boats, they carried the pestilence with them.

It's 1347, and the plague has arrived in Egypt. In Alexandria, at least 300 people died per day, with the numbers sometimes reaching 7,000 per day. There was a shortage of coffins, of shrouds, of preachers, and of grave diggers. Writing in Algeria, the historian Ibn Caldoun said of the pestilence that it... ...devastated nations and caused nations to vanish. The situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for abyssated. oblivion and restriction, and the world had responded to its call.

Across the Mediterranean in what is now Italy, 12 Genoese galleys arrive in Messina, and it is said by witnesses that the sailors... Carried such a disease in their bodies, that if anyone so much as spoke with one of them, he was infected with a deadly illness and could not avoid death. It's 1348, and the plague has arrived in Siena. There, the chronicler Agnolo D'etour,

wrote. The mortality was a cruel and horrible thing. It seemed that almost everyone became stupefied seeing the pain. It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth. Father abandoned child, wife, husband, one brother, another. For this illness seemed to strike through breath and sight, and so they died. None could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could without priest, without divine

offices. In many places in Siena, great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead, and they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth. As soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. I buried my five children with my own hands. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world. By the time that what we now refer to as the Black Death had subsided, somewhere between 75 and 200 million people in Afro-Eurasia would be dead. A loss of life so massive that entire towns and cities collapsed

and the Earth's temperature would cool. Nothing would ever be the same. But as devastating and important as the Black Death was, Until recently, we were as confused as our medieval forerunners about where exactly this horrible disease had originated from. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm speaking with Professor Philip Slavin from the University of Sterling. His work uses cutting-edge techniques of paleo-epidemiology and DNA research to consider exactly where and how the worst pandemic the world has ever seen began, and what that reveals to us about the medieval world. Philip, I want to say, first of all, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me.

I am really excited to have you along because I love talking about the Black Death, but one of the other things that you're an expert in is the other huge calamity of the 14th century that I think people really forget about on the way to the Black Death, which is The Great Famine. Can we start out by talking about what the Great Famine was and how things were already pretty bad in Europe earlier in the 14th? century, no? Absolutely. So the 14th century famine was one of the harshest subsistence crisis in recorded history. It was caused by a torrential reign of biblical proportions that started in the autumn of 1314 and just went on and on for 26 straight months, which is unbelievable. And the result was quite sad. You have three back-to-back harvest failures. People were starving,

but something very important that lots of people don't appreciate is that it's not that Mother Nature creates famine. It's really a man-made phenomenon because when you have shortages of food, we as humans, we start just acting in much more selfish way than what we really are. People that have advantage and have more access to food start storing food and the hoarding food and drives the prices up. So as a result, the prices were incredibly high. Very few people could afford buying anything. And then not before too long, people started developing all sorts of very nasty diseases. One important thing is that people don't die from hunger, starvation. They more tend to die from famine-induced diseases. So between 1315 and 1370, northern Europe, and I was focusing

on England and other parts of the British Isles, lost something in the area of 20% of the population, which is unbelievably high because an average famine, or what is defined as famine, you lose something between 5% to 10% of population. So if you think about the Irish potato famine, for example, which was one of the harshest famines. So the figures were quite comparable to what we have in the 14th century. So 20% of population died in this awful famine of 1315 to 1317. I think it's really important to remember that the great famine happened because here's this horrible event. Losing 20% of the population would be almost unheard of in the first place. And then you have a terrible pandemic come through. But the point is that this is really lurking

in the background for a lot of Europeans. They've just kind of got back on their feet again. And then along comes something even worse, which is the Black Death. Absolutely. To make things even worse, there was another awful biological disaster in the meantime. So the Great Famine ended in 1317 and two years later, you have an outbreak of cattle pestilence. And that was another awful disaster. It killed about 60 to 65 percent of British cattle. And that's something that had long-term repercussions for a local population, especially for peasantry.

So the replenishment of cattle after this disaster was painful, very expensive and very slow. So as a result, you're dealing with the entire generation of people that were deprived of some very important vitamins associated with dairy food. As a result, you're dealing with an entire generation of very weakened individuals in physical terms. Yeah, it's almost like they don't really stand a chance. Let's be very technical about this. What is the Black Death? The Black Death was the first wave in this long series of lake waves that visited Europe and the other parts of Western Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa

from the 14th up until the 19th century. So the Black Death was the first of those waves. Up until recently we had no idea where it started. There were lots of controversies and debates among historians, archaeologists and the scientists. There were different theories. Some theories thought that it started somewhere in Central Asia, some other people thought that it started somewhere in China, Mongolia was another candidate, Ramia, Caspian, and India and so on and so forth.

One scientist even thought that they didn't start on Earth at all. So it's been one of those greatest mysteries as far as its origins is concerned. It also was arguably the harshest and the most notorious killer of humans in recorded history. So we can assume now that it killed somewhere between 50, possibly 60% of population of Western Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa. It was one of those points where, at least, you know, part of humanity, were actually on the verge of extinction. And that sounds quite gloomy, but that's what it was. So there's this really exciting research that's kind of going on in terms of looking at the actual

genomic evidence that we have for the Black Death. And this is kind of pointing us now to thinking that it's come to us out of what is now Kyrgyzstan. Is that right? Yes, we live in very exciting times when lots of those mysterious questions can actually be answered now, thanks to amazing techniques of ancient DNA. studies. So you're working with microbiologists and those people actually have those amazing techniques. You really need a tooth from a human specimen. You drill there, you extract ancient DNA and the next thing you do, actually you verify if there is any presence of ancient bacteria or viruses or not.

And I was lucky to have joined hands with amazing colleagues from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and together we managed to get access to skulls from northern Kyrgyzstan from the same side where the Black Death started. And to our astonishment, there were several things that we found. We first of all found that there was indeed presence of the Yersinia pestis bacteria in those skulls. But even more remarkably, we found that phylogenetically, in other words, from the point of evolutionary development, that particular strain that was responsible for that outbreak, it was fallen right on what biologists refer to as the Big Bang of the 14th century.

Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, so the Big Bang was an evolutionary event and previously we weren't quite sure when exactly it happened, but previously it has been estimated at some point between the 11th and the 14th century, there was a major evolutionary event in the history of the plague bacterium whereby you have the emergence of no less than four new lineages. And that's a major event, Eleanor. You don't really get to see anything like that in other known evolutionary history of the same bacteria. In other words, something quite major was happening at the same time. And I mentioned, that it has been estimated that this major event took place between the 11th and the 14th century, but we weren't quite sure when. And actually our research solved this mystery as well, because that graveyard where we derived our skeletons, our skulls, is actually blessed with precisely dated tombstones. So we know that those individuals died in 1338 and 1339, because that's what is written on the actual tombstones. So in other words, now we firmly know that the Black Death actually did start somewhere in the region, possibly in northern,

Kyrgyzstan, possibly further south, maybe a little bit further east. We're not sure where, but it certainly started somewhere in the Tian Shan region. We also know that actually it did start around 1338, 1339. I think one of the other things that's really interesting about linking the Black Death starting off to this region is it really shows you how well connected the medieval world is in a lot of ways. I think now people tend to see Central Asia as a kind of very far away place that we don't have a lot of connections to, which is, of course, not true in and of itself. But this is a place that medieval people are moving through all the time, and it has connections with Europe. Oh, absolutely. I think one thing that also for our own contemporaries tend to forget is how amazingly urbanized that

part of the world used to be up until the second half of the 14th century. We have to distinguish, actually, between Central Asia before the Black Death and after the Black Death. Before the Black Death, it was one of the most urbanized parts of the world. You have literally hundreds of towns of different size. And we're talking about hundreds of those towns anywhere between the Caspian and China. And there were several routes that were connecting parts of Western Eurasia and Eastern Eurasia. And those routes are now commonly known as Silk Road. And there were caravans passing with merchants. There were lots of merchants going all the way from the Caspian, from Caucasus, from Crimea, all the way to China and then back. And there's more than enough evidence about that.

For example, one of the interesting things that we find archaeologically in the same graveyard in northern Kyrgyzstan that I was talking about is different coins that were minted in different parts of Central Asia. But what's really remarkable is that some of those coins were minted in very far away places. Termez, which is on the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border, in Sultania, which was the capital of the Ilkanate. It was one of the Mongol canates that overlaps roughly with Iran and part of Iraq. Some of these coins came from Samarkand. In other words, you have more than enough evidence about very extensive and long-distance trade that was happening around the time of the Black Death. But at the same time, it's also important to realize that around the time of the Black Death,

around the type of the same epidemic that happened in Northern Kyrgyzstan, you actually have the first signs of crisis in international trade, which was caused by war, and slowly but surely different segments of the Silk Road were simply shot, and long-distance strain got paralyzed. So one of the reasons actually why it took such a long time for the Black Death strain to reach Europe, or to be more precise to reach Crimea, because it was from Crimea, that in 1347 it was imported to other parts of Europe. So one of the reasons why it took such a long time, seven years, is because long-distance rate was paralyzed. And it was really a movement of strain was correspondingly low because of that.

There was nothing you could really do, I think, about this in terms of in a world before antibiotic. It's such an incredibly virulent kind of disease that if you came into contact with anyone in the area at all, it was just going to get to you. But I think this is all a really important and interesting bit as well because I think a lot of the time when we talk about the Black Death, people act like this is something that just happened to Europe. And I've certainly seen, for example, myths about it where people will say, oh, only Europe was really affected by the Black Death because medieval Europeans didn't bathe, which is untruth on top of untruth. You have all these really terrible things that are happening in Central Asia. You have a complete destabilization of a region, an incredibly wealthy and important place at the time, and it fundamentally changes it.

And I think that that is important to realize with all this, that this isn't a story about Europeans. This is a story about Afro-Eurasia as a whole. Plague history, even now, it massively suffers from very Western Eurocentric perspective, where we tend to forget what happened in the other parts of the world, despite the fact that we have amazing documentation. For example, in the Middle East, the proportions of this disaster in terms of human toll were no less serious than it was in Europe.

We have very good quantitative data from Syria and from Egypt, where you can see that actually people were dying, roughly speaking, in the same proportions as they were dying in Europe. So we're talking about anywhere between 50% and 60% of population, and the long-term effects on some part of the Middle East were actually harsher than were in Europe. I mean, think about Egypt, for example. I'm talking about pre-industrial period, right?

So to successfully sustain its agricultural output, Egypt has to have enough work in hands because it all depends on the irrigation technology, right? So you have those canals along the Nile River, and it's very labor-intensive sector, which is dependent on a permanent supply of working hands. When you end up with a situation, when you lose about 50% of your population,

you simply don't have enough hands to handle and work those irrigation canals, And then you had recurrent outbreaks of plague in the course of the 14th and the 15th century. So as a result, actually, Egypt from one of the wealthiest regions in the world, slowly but surely was becoming one of the poorest ones. Just one example. I think that is just so incredibly terrifying on a number of levels. One of the things I'm quite interested in terms of black death stuff is health outcomes and social outcomes as a result of the black death.

And am I correct in thinking that a lot of the death? the time, some of the places that we see as being hit hardest, I mean, Egypt having very particular agricultural needs, notwithstanding, but they're often places that are quite well urbanized, right? Because you're kind of cheek by jowl with other people, so it sort of jumps around. Hence, you know, a huge die-offs in Egypt, which is incredibly urbanized, or in the Middle East, or in Central Asia, where we see these really big cities. That's a very good point. One of the things that happens within, say, 50 or 70 years from the outbreak of the Black Death in Central Asia is that most of those urban centers were simply

abandoned. One thing we have to understand is that we don't have lots of textual evidence from Central Asia. That's why we have to rely on archaeology and there's a very good archaeological record showing that the majority of those urban centers just got abandoned and there was a huge decline in the overall number of those places. As far as other parts in Europe are concerned that here we really have to distinguish between different places because you have some instances in England, for example, when certain cities like Norwich declined, but other places like York, for example, or Bristol, were booming despite the crisis. In other words, it all depends on the ability of local community to be resilient, and here the factors are very complicated.

You can have one urban community with very low ability of resilience, and that's why this community just depopulated and was subjected to a long-term crisis, but another community was just prospering because of its ability to encourage people to implement. immigrate there and just to restore its previous glory. Yeah, you know, in terms of the city that I work on the most, Prague, it's actually quite a funny story because Prague just kind of is all right. For some reason, you know, this isn't to say that nobody died of the plague there and there's a kind of lively discussion about that, shall we say, some people saying that the plague was there, other people saying that there wasn't. But, you know, it doubles in size over the 14th century.

You know, in the period when everyone else is dying in Europe, there's a lot of people who say, oh, well, hey, ho, lost mine. entire family, guess I'm going to Prague. And so it actually experiences the opposite. But I think that's actually one of the really intriguing things about the Black Death is that, yeah, and sometimes it means the collapse of certain places. I mean, certainly here in England, you know, we lose whole villages because people just pick up and leave after everybody's dead. Or, you know, you see places like, I don't know, Florence, I suppose, loses about 50% of its population, but then bounces back. You don't really know how particular places are going to react one way or another, which I think is really quite fascinating. It's quite fascinating. And if we're going back to the story of Fragg, there certainly

were recurrent outbreaks in Bohemia. Most likely it was hit the Black Death, despite, you know, the fact that some historians think otherwise. There also was an outbreak in 1350, 960, then there was another one in 1369, 71. And of course, then you have this major outbreak in 1380. So, you have at least four recurrent waves within the space of what 30 years. But despite the fact, despite that, despite all this carnage and loss in human life, you still have this remarkable growth in the population of Prague. I think Florence is a very good example as well. It was ultimately down to individual in lack or fortune of individuals, which of course was very closely tied with the efficiency of local governance because some cities were blessed with very efficient

and very competent governance and some other cities were not really. really that lucky. I think that's absolutely the case. And I'm also quite interested in the way that individuals sort of there, because there's been some quite interesting research along the lines of yours about what happens with various groups of people in the Black Death. So, for example, you know, in the same way that we all sort of experienced in our recent pandemic during the COVID-19 crisis, we saw really different health outcomes for people

based on, for example, a socioeconomic bracket. You know, it's one thing if you could stay home all the time and kind of avoid it. But if you're a health care worker or if you were someone who worked in a kitchen, you know, I know in America actually the number one dangerous job to have during COVID-19 was to be a short order cook. It had the highest death rate of anyone in America. And we do see somewhat similar things we think now in terms of health outcomes in the black death, right? So, I mean, poorer people, you know, you're also probably still reeling from things

like having grown up during the cattle pestilence in England, but also, you know, having the kind of work that means that you come into contact with others and you can't really hide, right? It's very interesting question, Eleanor, and I think the answer is incredibly complicated here. Let me just give an example. So in England, for which we have the best statistical sources, right? So we can roughly speak and estimate that women and men were died in equal proportions, even though we can say with a certain degree of confidence that guys used to spend more time outdoors, most of the time, whereas women tend to stay more indoors. But despite that, actually you have both genders to the same extent to catch and get infected.

But what's really interesting is that when you get to the second wave known as the Pestesikunda, which hit England in 1361 and 1362, then something really remarkable happens. You have clear evidence that guys were actually much more prone, much more susceptible to the second wave, and much less women would die. We have no idea why. It's one of the most fascinating things.

I would like to speculate here maybe. Possibly it was just molecular differences between the strain that was responsible for the black death and the strain that was responsible for the second wave. They were similar, but they also were different. We still don't really know what was special on molecular level, on very in-depth molecular level, with a strain that caused the second wave after the Black Death,

but there you go. Much more guys died than women. So I think it really differ from strain to strain, from outbreak to outbreak, because every outbreak was associated with different strain, just like COVID. Now, I think that that is such a intriguing thing to think about. There used to be real big debates about strains

that kind of in the 90s around the Black Deaths, The theories, for example, of the things that people were dying about it, and the black death wasn't the black death at all. It was anthrax. I remember that one pretty vividly. And, you know, certain people trying to differentiate, for example, between what they would call the bubonic and the pneumonic plagues. And I think one of the things that's so fascinating about your work and the genomic work that we're being able to do now is kind of having a direct look at the bones and say, okay, well, yeah, it's a different strain. It's slightly different from the ursinia pestis that we see initially, but that's still your kind of. guy, right? I don't blame historians for doubting the fact that it wasn't actually caused by plague, because you can't really be certain about anything unless you have evidence. And it wasn't until 2010, when we have the first microbiological publication where it was able to establish clearly

that the black death was actually caused by a different strain of plague than the strains that were known at that point. Now, of course, we know that plague has very long evolutionary history. It's not in the medieval disease. The history of play goes all the way back at least six and most likely more, maybe 7,000 years ago. We know that late Neolithic countries gatherers all over Eurasia were infected with your Sydney pestis. It is quite possible that the entire civilizations of late Neolithic period collapsed because of circulation of bacteria. Lots of unknowns and that's why we live in such an exciting times, at least scientifically. When you have something as horrifying as this happen. I think it's really difficult for people now to kind of accept that terrible things

just happen. You know, sometimes you can have a germ that mutates and terrible things happen. And it doesn't have to do with people being superstitious. It doesn't have to do with people being, you know, gross. There isn't a kind of moral way out of this to justify when terrible things happen. sometimes you just have pandemics, and especially you have pandemics in well-connected worlds where people are kind of living by each other when you haven't got away, you know, of stopping it. You know, until antibiotics came along, no one could have really done anything about this. That's a very good way to put that. Obviously, you have tendency to blame everything on humans.

It's very hard, actually, to understand that there's certain molecular processes that are sometimes very, very, complicated. Sometimes they're very badly understood. There are lots of unknowns and there are lots of variables that we still don't understand how they work. And so of aspects of how your synepas bacteria mutates, for example. And sometimes one mutation is enough just for some crazily bad disastrous outbreak to unfold and kill 50 or 60 percent of population. Just like it happened with a black death. And obviously it has nothing to do with humans. And humans had no agency there. They had agency maybe in terms of traders or soldiers as people who were helping facilitating this disease. But it would have been there without humans anyways.

It would just a matter of time that it would spread anyways. Now, I find that a really interesting point as well because I think that there is also, you know, some tendency to kind of mock the medieval people who were trying to make sense of the Black Death. You know, where people didn't have an answer for this. And, you know, nobody had an answer because nobody knew what a... germ was yet, which is fair enough. If you don't have germ theory, there's no way to understand this. And we do have this tendency to kind of make fun of people for saying, oh, well, I suppose God is punishing us, where we say, oh, it's so obvious that this is just kind of a thing that happens. But we retain this real desire to kind of blame people in the past for not having known or not

being able to guess how it is that this terrible disease is spreading. One of the most important advice I can ever give to anyone is don't judge historical communities, historical cultures through the prism of our contemporary perspective. That's a very dangerous idea because you always have to understand what was the context. What were the resources? What was the knowledge? What was the technology around that time? When we're going back to the 14th century, the only knowledge of medicine they had was the same hypocritic, Hellenic knowledge that was around for 2,000 years, right? and it was very slowly changing.

Some things were not changing at all. It was based on the theory of four humors and the disposition of bodies with different humors to different diseases, and then it was related to planetary constellation and other things. We know that they're not really related to how pathogens work. But we have to wait actually all the way until the later 19th century when great people like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch,

and of course most importantly for us, Alexander Rier-Sin, the same guy who was the first first, one to isolate and sequence the plague bacteria in 1894. That's why it's called the Yersinia pestis, thanks to him. But it doesn't mean that it's the right thing actually to judge those totally helpless and totally clueless 14th century individuals by our own standards. I'm also really quite interested in how the plague is very recurrent now, right? And this is one of the wonderful things about the post-germ world, right? And you know, we know what germs are. And this is more specifically a bacterium. It's not a virus.

And that means that we're actually really great at treating the black death now, right? Like, it's a terrible thing if it goes untreated, but we can kind of get in front of it if people do come down with it, yes? It depends where and where, of course. Plague hasn't been eradicated and it will be very difficult to eradicate that because, first of all, Plague is not a human disease. It's first and foremost it's a wild rodent disease. It thrives in reservoirs of wild rodents like marmots, gerbils, so on and so forth.

And you still have Lake Reservoirs. In the United States of America, you have prairie dogs all around in Colorado and parts of California and in Montana all the way actually to southern Saskatchewan. And I'm just very lucky. Those current strains are not as deadly as the strain of the Black Death. But in theory, and you don't want to sound gloomy and dummy, but in theory, sometimes one mutation is enough just to create some very highly virulent strain that you have some very serious repercussions. Of course, we have antibiotics and other ways to treat the lake.

But the question is, do we have enough hospital capacity? That's another question we have to ask. And we also have to keep in mind that eubonic plague is only one of three major types of plague. We also have pneumonic plague, right? Which is spread by droplets, and that's hardly treatable disease. And most people just die within 24 hours. And then you also have septicemic plague when it gets to your blood system. And again, that's virtually 100% death.

It all depends where you are and what context and what context. strain we're dealing with. You know, I think that that is such an important thing to keep in mind, right? We never really know what's going to happen with germs. And so I think that it bears repeating because it can help you feel a bit more softly to people in the past. And also, I think it behooves us all. If we think about our ancestors in the past as dealing with this horrible thing and actually the fact that they managed to keep a society together at all whatsoever is incredible.

face of famine and plague and God knows what else. Of course, a huge ongoing wars in a lot of parts of Afro-Huratia as well. Yes, indeed. And I think lots of people just fail to realize how the overall potential of this disease. And it is still around. We just don't hear about that because it tends to kill some individuals in a very sparsely populated communities somewhere in the Himalayas, for example, right? Or Malagascar. And those are not huge numbers. But again, I think that we always have to be in mind and approach that from the perspective of very sophisticated, very developed communities of the West and the 21st century, which are allegedly so different from these people in the 14th century. We always have to keep things in perspective and be careful.

Well, I think your work, Phil, is really helping us all do that. And I can't thank you enough for it and for coming on today to chat with us about it. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much, Eleanor, for having me over. Thank you. Thank you so much as always for listening, and thank you to Philip for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit, and if you've liked what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode,

and my co-host Matt Lewis will be back on Friday. Until next time.