Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 456: The Black Death Part I - Stomp a Gerbil, Bribe a Rat

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

This week we begin a five-part series on a catastrophe that remains one of the most destructive things to ever happen to humanity — the Black Death AKA the Great Mortality AKA the Big Death. For part one, we examine the conditions that led to the worst pandemic in history. Spoiler alert: it involves an ungodly amount of human shit.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

My therapist this morning had asked me to stop talking about the black plague. Oh that's exciting. Maybe this has nothing to do with what we were talking about last week. You kind of wanted to talk about some issues with your parents and I was like good on you dear Katie. You don't know what happens when the miasma, it spreads. Dead men go in the world. Oh my. Nine men don't come out. That's horrifying. Tendrils of the reaper. And she's like I'm still charging for this. And I was like I'm running material. She should charge you double. Welcome to the last podcast of the Leftover One. I am Ben hanging out with Marcus and once again the recently I guess divorced from his therapist, Henry Zabrowski.

She can't quit me. Can you? She can. She actually legally very much can't quit you. She's addicted to the heat. I don't know about any of that. Alright, today's episode this is going to be the beginning of a fantastic series. We got four parts coming your way and it is all about the black death. Yes. It sounds like super metal but it also sounded like it was a horrible time to be alive. Yeah. That's what was so metal about it. Ben I gotta ask you are we going to be continuing the Wisconsin tradition here? Are you going to be referring to it as the plague? The black plague? Of course. I'm going to say plague. I'm going to say baggle. And I don't care because I am from Wisconsin and that's what we do. And come

at me. You come at me. Yeah. You attack him physically. We are going to be saying plague. We're also up front we're going to say we're not saying bubonic. It's difficult in our mouths. No. We're not teachers. I'll say bubo but I will not say bubonic. I will say bubonic plague but I won't say bubo. Bubonic? Bubonic sounds like a pubic hair that's gone rogue and what was it? Bobo? Bubo? He sounds like one of the brothers from nothing but trouble. Like little debo's brother, little devil brothers that no one talks about. No, Katie. He just throws up a fucking stream of blood. Thank you, bubo. I don't want to get everybody used to it right now because you're going to be experiencing a lot of shit in this episode

and in this series. I mean actual shit. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. This is great. Put on your swimming cap, folks. The black death, a.k.a. the great mortality, a.k.a. the big death was a medieval pandemic that killed over a third of Europe in the 14th century, described by some as the worst century in history to be alive. I was up all night with plague nightmares. That is true. I definitely had a dream that I was an NPC in Skyrim walking through a village while people are going. I have never experienced a prep for last podcast and left that had more people screaming, just openly screaming for years ever since Robert Irvine's nudes were leaked. Oh my goodness. Ever seen a guy from Restaurant Impossible?

Yes, I have. Restaurant very possible. What a guy. We're using the foster scale that quantifiably measures death, physical damage, and emotional suffering. The only event in human history that was more catastrophic than the black death was World War II. Making the black death the second worst thing to ever happen to humanity. And that's ahead of World War I, which itself killed 20 million people. Now, Marcus, tell us why you're excited about it. I'm excited about it because this is history. I've been waiting for this fucking episode for years. I've been wanting to do the black death ever since I read The Great Mortality, which we'll talk about later. It's such a fantastic book. But man, I'm so excited about

this. This is some fucking deep, dark, insane human history. I'm just so happy. Millions and millions of people died a horrible death so we could do this podcast in 2021. It's amazing. They're so happy. Hey man, it changed the world. We'll get into the ways that it changed, actually changed the world for the better. Lesky want to still be a surf, my friend. No, I don't. We'll get into that later on. I really, really don't. If you listen to certain authors that we've read this week, they talk about how this time period, while it only lasted, quote unquote, three years, the main chunk of it, if you were to zoom back into this little window, like if you went into any random Tuesday in 1347, it would

be the single worst thing you have ever seen in your life. What if they would fear you as a god? They don't. They don't because they'd hang you because god did this to them. What? They also will say, what's fun about the bubonic plague? It's all God's fault. Oh my. It's been God's fault to them. They considered it God's fault, but they were like, thanks God. And they're like, step on me, God. I mean, if you're God, that's a hell of a reality show. Watch everyone's shiver and die. This is a great season, God. People burying their children in shallow graves and the dirt can't go up high enough so the dogs are going in and pulling their fucking noses off and they have to beat off the dogs.

They have to beat all the dogs that are also plague stricken so all the dogs are covered in sores going, they're throwing up blood. You're throwing up blood burying your family. Straight, but what an odd time to find romance. Yeah. And you have to imagine it had happened. Somebody fell in love during this time period. It was kind of romantic. Maybe. Well, besides just people, the black death killed almost everything on legs, infecting dogs, cats, birds, camels, rabbits, lions, and almost 200 more species with an infection that's almost, but not quite as bad as Ebola. Whoa. And we don't know exactly how many people died in the black death because the worst plague years occurred over 700 years ago,

but the widely accepted figure for European mortality was 33% of the population. One third of the entire continent was gone. Yeah. All right, guys, you got to choose who's it going to be. Who's dying here? Oh, yeah. It's people don't use the turn signals. Number one. I'm going to say it. I've lost three. Oh, out of us three. Henry, you got to go. I'm sorry. I have to go. Marcus and I were technically, you're technically, you were the last one to join the podcast. Yes. I know it was episode two, but I'm going to have to say all three of us are going to have to die. God damn it. That's how it is. I think it's, we got to all go together. All right. Fine. 9-11 rules. We'll jump together. But that means that

between the time that the plague arrived in Sicily in 1347 and the time that it roared in the Moscow in 1352, Europe had lost 25 million of its 75 million inhabitants, but 33% is just the overall continental figure. Some cities lost 60% of their population and entire villages throughout rural Europe were wiped off the map completely, which makes counting the total losses that much more difficult. Also, the diseases, and we'll talk about this because it's really fun about the Black Death is that it's all theoretical, baby. All of this shit. What do you mean? When every single idea of where the plague came from and how it's spread and exactly what happened, it's all just the pile and up of

various journal entries, wills that were made, various inventory records, like historians talking about it, but from the perspective of terrified people running from the plague. So we still don't know the origins of this Black Death. We do. We do. We've got a pretty good idea and recent science has actually helped us to understand stuff about the plague a lot better, specifically about the genetics and which places did actually have the plague and which places didn't have the plague. So that's the funny thing. That's the amazing thing is that we're actually, like right now, it's like a fountain of new plague knowledge. Yeah, I knew. I'm actually getting some information here. Oh, we have Alex Jones with us. Yeah,

I was made in the lab. Yeah, I was made in the lab. Thank you, Alex. In the last 10 years, we've learned more about the plague than we had in the last 200. It's fucking crazy. But those numbers that just talked about that's just in Europe. The plague actually started in inner Asia. But because of how many wars were going on in Asia during the 14th century, particularly in China, it's hard to give an exact number of plague deaths. What we do know is that from 1200 to 1393, half of China died. Oh my gosh. Dropping their population from 123 million to 65 million. You know, to be honest, though, this would be the heyday for Dr. Pimple Popper because of all this would be if you're into popping

like no, no, bro, no, bro, because it's the only way you got the bubonic version of the plague was by popping those pimples. Dr. Pimple Popper spread the plague. Worst of all, though, is that while the Black Death is considered to have lasted about four years, the second pandemic is it was called lasted for centuries. After the initial wave that killed tens of millions, the Black Death came back every 10 years or so to the point where the plague was just a normal, recurring part of life that could still kill a quarter of a city well into the 19th century. And even then, it was just replaced by cholera, which is a bacteria that causes you to shit yourself to death. At least you're having fun.

It's like Pennywise the Clown. It is. It just comes back every 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Again and again and again because it's not a virus, it's a bacteria. It can travel in different means. It can do different shit and it's also very fast acting, which is also what's really interesting about the plague is the fact that it has massive spikes because what it does, it kills you so fast depending on what type and what version of plague that you get, it kills you so fast that you don't even know you have it. You feel like in shitty one day, you can die within the day of the symptoms kicking in. You don't know what's just sitting inside of your body. So you're really just, all of a sudden you have the

plague then everybody else you know has the plague and then everybody's fucking dead 72 hours later. Jesus. There was one person who told a story that said that they went to an inn, everybody was fine and then when they woke up the next morning everybody inside was dead with them. It's like the movie 28 days later, but real? But real and it happened. Oh my God. That's also what's fortunate about how fast it murders you is the fact that it has nowhere

to live. So then the plague burns itself out really fast, but it just takes using a lot of humans as kindling. Yeah. Okay, so it's kind of obese. It's an overeater in some ways, the bacteria. Yeah. But before we get into the whys, wares and hows of the black plague, let's acknowledge our sources for this four part series. Our main source for this series is the Great Mortality by John Kelly, which is absolutely in my top three favorite history books alongside the

indifferent stars above by Daniel James Brown, which we use for our Donner Party series and Timothy Egan's harrowing history of the Dust Bowl, the worst hard time. And I can give the testament to that book. The Great Mortality is absolutely fantastic because I think I'm like a lot of our listeners where I knew about the black death from like any history documentary style or like as a footnote in high school history, we're going to be doing some high school history today just so you know, it's going to be just you're going to have to absorb it. It's a part of it. All right. I'm going to put a little, I'm going to sneak a little whiskey in here. I'm

going to put a little chewing tobacco. I'll feel just like I'm in high school. How do I reach these keys? But I was really astounded, especially upon reading the Great Mortality, just how intense this whole thing was and just the level of panic and fear and what was happening to humanity as a whole. Like the trauma that we experienced in that decade will changed everything. It changed the whole fabric of society. I'd also give big ups to the great courses on Amazon. I watched on 24 hours of fucking plague. Okay. You are in it, my friend. Let's get into it.

But in addition to that book, we've also read a ton of articles and watched a slew of documentaries. And for color, we've chosen the Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer, which is both delightful and horrifying in its own way. It's so good. It's such a worthy part of your library. I was flipping through and they said that people had to wait in line to get hanged. That's the worst part about getting hung is waiting in line, just be like, can I get an easy pass? Can I skip the line? Can you just hang me already? I am done with this. Now as far as to what the killing machine that actually caused the Black Death is, and

I say is because it's still around. What? Yeah, dude. People just got out of... I can't emotionally handle that idea. I mean, people say I can't handle that thought in my mind right now. Seriously, don't worry. The only the Black Death would make a comeback is if society completely and totally collapsed. Yeah, which will only take a giant solar flare. All we need is what we're due for. We're due for a big solar flare, which is true. Talk about existential threats. Of all the existential threats in the world, it just hangs out. The plague just waits to wake up. I do not like this Richard Ramirez bacteria.

Well the culprit is a bacterium called Yersinia pestis, which is a different sort of organism than the viruses and parasites that we mostly deal with today. Thankfully, the plague can now be treated with antibiotics, even though it still has a mortality rate of 10% with treatment. It's like Mike Tyson. He's fat, but he's still dangerous. Don't even let him hear you say that. I know. I'm sorry. But back in the Middle Ages, nothing was as bad as the plague outside of maybe leprosy.

Concerning the different ways that plague can kill a person, there are actually three varieties, each deadlier than the last. The first is probably the most well-known, and the one we'll be focusing on for this series, the bubonic plague. You used to say bubonic. It does sound ghost-centric. Yeah, it sounds... Oh yeah, the bubonic. Yeah, I always think bubonic, and then it's like, oh my god, did tit start this? Lastly, they're near all day.

They grow next to the tits. They grow next to the tits. They're the titty's neighbors. Oh my god, titty shouldn't have neighbors. Unless it's me. You're not a neighbor. You're an intruder. Well, after the bubonic plague enters a person's bloodstream, through methods we'll discuss later, the bacterium begins to build up in the lymph nodes where it multiplies, resulting in the onset of flu-like symptoms within two to six days of infection. Eventually, those infected lymph nodes will hemorrhage and die, often becoming necrotic while the victim is

still alive. So you begin to rot. All of these really focus on the fact that you begin to rot while you're breathing. Imagine the odor just walking down the streets during this time. I'll get into the odor here in a second. After the flu sets in, the body will begin to show egg-shaped bumps called bubos in the general region where the virus entered the body, as well as near the groin. In fact, the word bubonic comes from the Greek word for groin.

Yeah. Essentially, it's groin plague. Noits, nutsack-like. Oh mama, okay. Now these bubos are extremely painful and can become black with infection, and one plague doctor in the 17th century actually survived his infection by lancing and cutting away his own bubos one by one as they popped up by himself for six weeks straight. What those bubos become filled with is liquid plague. Like, your blood becomes like this

alien? Yes, and so when you pop it, if you already have it, it's fine, but just the slick black mucus and pus that's inside of those things, if it touches your skin much like Ebola, you got it buddy. Dang, alright. People like this plague doctor who survived often came away from the experience with deformations, like a permanent crook if the bubo was in the neck, or a limp if the infection attacked the thigh, and if you were deformed coming out of it, you were fucking lucky because that meant you survived.

I do think it was really fun in the time travelers guide to medieval England that were like, if you're in the 13th century, in the 14th century, just know for a fact that if just living your life, if you're not an aristocrat that has been sitting on pillows away from everything for forever, even then, you still have horse riding accidents, training accidents, you walk crooked in medieval England, you don't have whole limbs, you've got broken feet, you've got twisted backs, everybody's, I do, I, I, I, everywhere they go, it is nothing but hunchbacks. Maybe they're very wise, and of course they're great at ringing bells, they're dumber than

they've ever been. Well famously, these bubos are said to be the inspiration for a nursery rhyme that I assume children are still singing today. Ring around the Rosie. Now it's all Joe, Joe, Siwa. Yeah. You probably, you probably can't even say ring around Rosie anymore. Yeah, it's cancel culture.

Yeah, you can't even say ring around, what's it, yeah, it was Rosie for the, oh, you saying it. Oh, these guys, the boys are really going there, cancel culture, they're going there. Finally someone's saying it. I'm saying it, I'm going there. Now the Rosie is the inflamed bubo, the pocketful opposies is the supposed preventative measure that didn't work, the ashes are the ashoe of plague sneezing, and the all fall down is of course everybody dying.

However, while this legend has been spread around since the 1800s, most folklorists believe that this assertion is a bit of Balderdash in folder all. Mostly since the rhyme itself wasn't recorded until centuries after the last big plague, which was like 1600. Debunked? No. There's going to be a lot of, the debunk alarm is going to go off several times during this series because we're going to do a little bit of debunking, but we're all, we are going

to do some rebunking. And then we're going to do a fair amount of you really didn't know how fucking awful it was. Debunking, you no longer have to live with your brother, you both got your own rooms, rebunking, you went to college, you have a roommate. Yep. Extended adolescence. Interesting.

Extended adolescence is going right up to 45 now. I really hope so. So following the appearance of buboes, purple splotches would begin to appear on the chest, back, or neck of the victim, which was usually a telltale sign that the victim was in fact going to die from the plague no matter what was done. Hey, doc, tell me, do you think I'm going to live? I do not. When you just fucking end it, then you just fucking do it.

Legally I cannot. Well, I think back in the day, I think medieval doctors can't put you out of misery. I hope they can. It sounds like everyone needed to just kind of, maybe off with your own head. Yeah. Well, in the middle ages, when the purple splotches showed up, that was usually the point in which you would be abandoned to die alone while the rest of your household fled. And that didn't matter if the victim was an elderly parent, a sibling, a spouse, or even

one's own child. Once you're dead, it's like, okay, fuck it, you're dying alone, I'm not getting this. Yeah, it was such a common occurrence, because nobody wants to die of the plague. You really don't, and if you're watching it in front of you, I imagine you especially don't. Yeah. It's a hell of a time for a germ chaser, though. Oh.

Just a bunch of people licking welts. There is some of that. We'll cover that in the next couple episodes. Interesting. So if someone got off on it. There's always, everyone always gets off on something. Yeah. Well, the victim would at this point both look and smell as if they were about to die, because

they would be surrounded by an overpowering stench that combined sweat, spittle, bad breath, anal leakage, excrement, and quite possibly blood vomit. If you're lucky. Oh my God. The smell would also be accompanied by the extremities such as the toes, fingers, lips, and the tip of the nose turning black and falling off, which is, you know, the black death. And once the body turned gangrenous, death was inevitable.

Yeah. Because then the infection's literally coming from your own limbs. Oh my God. But this is kind of a combo of the two different types of, well, this is a combo of two of the types of plague, right? Because you have the bubonic, which is the, you can get the boils and shit, but then I believe it's called the semiotic, the semiotic plague, which is that you start to liquefy when your body, your, the membranes and your organs break down very similar to Ebola.

And that's where the black and red patterns come on your body, is that it's literally the blood from inside of your arteries and veins working its way through your muscles out to the surface where you just slowly become applesauce. I haven't said this in a while. I haven't said this in quite a while, but gout, get it out. Finally. Oh, Jesus. This is horrifying.

Things are going to change in 2022. Cut to the one guy jerking off profusely as you slowly die, because he's the ultimate germ chaser. Now as horrifying as this sounds, the bubonic plague is actually the best kind of plague to get because it has the highest rate of survivability. It only kills about 60% of those infected when it's left untreated. You could go to the doctor at medieval times. Cover the bubos.

There were doctors. Yeah. A lot of times were technically also wizards, but if you walk into a quote-unquote doctor's office at medieval times, cover them bubos, and you can go like, tell me, oh my look in dark. They can look at you and be like, look at pretty good, because you only have a 60% chance of dying. Oh my God.

Well, doctors around that time would have looked at you and said, well, I told the pins, because your infection come upon you when Taurus was in Leo's sign, was Saturn coming into Sagittarius' sign, then yes, you have a chance. Honestly, doc, I've got to tell you, I've shat out my lung this morning, and that can happen, I guess. But also, you know, you just rolled in, but they probably wouldn't even see you, because at that point the doctor would be running screaming from you. Yes, interesting.

The next deadliest form of the plague, Pneumonic Plague, is airborne and infects the lungs, causing the victim to spit up blood and spray plague into the air. This one kills the victim within days and has a mortality rate of 95%. Like getting hives. You know what I mean? This whole series is like, I sit sometimes and I read all of the information about the actual virus or the actual bacteria, and I sweat. Like I'm gripping the book, the edges of the book are wet.

Yeah. Goes right past me. Wow. Obviously, all of our ancestors survived. Yeah. Yeah. I guess. I don't know.

But the worst plague by far is the Septicemic Plague. Thankfully uncommon due to how fast it kills its victims, Septicemic Plague sends a rush of toxic plague bacilli through the bloodstream, killing the infected in just 15 hours with a 100% mortality rate. You become a walking, thinking pile of plague. You just become, you just turn inside out and it just killed you too fast to be effective. The plague has very controversial opinions, very controversial opinions on what's going on.

Wow. And that's, I guess, I want that one just to get it over with as quick as possible. They all said that the Pneumonic Plague was the best version to get because you're just out. You're in and out. You barely even know. You can die within the day. I don't think anybody wants a Septicemic Plague because it's not good.

Even the short time, but I imagine you really feel every second. Yeah. I don't imagine your body just lights on fire with fever. Like, it's just that probably the most painful, it feels like burning to death slowly. I would imagine. Don't tell me you're just like, what the fuck? Yeah. What the fuck?

And they didn't even have the John Wayne Gacy doc to watch on Peacock. They just didn't lay there staring at God knows what. But the Pneumonic Plague was the thing. You also become this, this, a non-person. You become a walking vision of death. So no one wants to be around you. Even if you do live, you're like, please, I just couldn't use a bit of agony. And everyone's like, God, maybe it's from you.

Because I was thinking about how lepers, I was talking about, you know how they identified lepers back in the day? They put a sack on you and you carry a bell. And if you go, that is the truth. So they, so people don't have to see you. And then you ring a bell to let people know that you're coming so they can go inside. Isn't that nice and demeaning. I'm so happy they figured it all out.

I mean, with leprosy, like it is, you do fall apart. Like you just fucking fall apart. And this is a time when they didn't understand fucking anything about anything, not really. You say fall apart, I say you get little skin chips. The worst apparently is when your nose finally melts into your skull and then you get, this is true, the river of melted nose gunk slides through your skull hole into your throat and then it makes you hoarse because your liquid face hurts your throat. Wow.

There's no bits in this episode. No, it doesn't sound like it. This is just pure horror. It sounds like you could make for a great AM radio voice though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cancel culture. We go there. But concerning the Black Death, with which this series is all about, there are some scientists who don't believe that the Great Mortality was a bubonic plague at all, but was rather

a result of a highly infectious outbreak of anthrax that came back again and again and again. Ian Curtis, how fucking dare you, bro? How dare you? Wow. See, anthrax is an incredibly hardy bacterium, so tough that anthrax spores have been discovered in soil that had covered an animal killed by an anthrax infection 70 years previous. What's more is that the symptoms of anthrax are close to what was described in historical

accounts of the Black Plague, i.e. flu-like symptoms followed by severe pneumonia and respiratory collapse. I thought the symptoms of anthrax were thrashing around and banging your head, trying to use them to heal us? You are fucking doomed. Similarly, if the victim is infected by anthrax after consuming infected anthrax meat, they will vomit blood, and the bubo-like boils and lesions that often show up in bodies of anthrax-infected individuals look very similar to those in Black Plague victims.

The hitch here, though, is that anthrax is too deadly, with an untreated fatality rate of 85%. But it's so hardy. The spores are so hardy, which is why we use them for biological weapons, because you could make it into a fine powder. Do you remember when they did that? I do remember. Yep.

They're still doing it. Yeah. Yeah. You haven't seen it in a bit, though. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Yeah, we haven't had an anthrax scare in probably, what, 15 years? Yeah, not in a while.

I guess we're due for one. It was an early hot thing. I don't want one. Not here, though. No. No. However, some people do believe that this hypothesis, the anthrax hypothesis, explains why the plague flared up once a decade or so for centuries after the Black Death's

initial march, because people in the Middle Ages didn't necessarily dispose of infected corpses properly, animal or human. So you fucking, you handle an infected corpse of fucking the anthrax, an animal that died of anthrax, boom, you got anthrax again, and all of a sudden it's fucking everywhere. Yeah. Tiny little spores. All it takes is little spores to get you sick, little tiny little bits of it, which is also like the septicemic version of the plague, which is you only need a little bit of it

to get it inside of you. But also, they have the idea that there might have been some form of airborne tuberculosis. There might have been another form of some hemorrhagic fever that they think might be similar to a more dangerous airborne version of AIDS. What sins did these people commit? Why did this happen to them? Feudalism. This happened to end feudalism, which we're going to get to.

The idea that, because it also, it could have been all of the shit at once. Jesus. It really could have been. Like I said, the worst century to be alive. Again, somebody enjoyed it. But the wildest theory out there is that the plague actually came from outer space. Yeah, bro. You're talking about-

Wait, what? How? Okay, hold on a second. How did you sneak UFOs into this fucking- It's not UFOs. It's not UFOs, and it was actually put forth by a respected academic, a Cambridge astrophysicist named Fred Hoyle, who wrote a book in 1979 called Diseases from Space. From Space.

It sounds like gangstalker talk. You know what I mean? Like it sounds like what you think that Tom Hanks is doing to you from Hitchbunker in Australia, because he's never left Australia. You know that, right? When he got quote unquote COVID-19, he's been in Australia ever since, and now what we're seeing is this fucking clone who's his brother. They actually made a clone of him.

Really? Yeah, there's DNA, but they adjusted the DNA so it would look just like him, so DNA, the DNA-wise, they're not exactly identical, but actually, if you look at them, they're identical. Why would they do that? Okay, all right. We'll see Hoyle, along with co-author Nalen Wick-Ramasing, believe that while Darwin's theory of evolution was correct up to a point, some external elements were necessary to seed

our planet with life. This is known as the panspermia hypothesis. Panspermia is also called when you just come on anybody. Again? Well. But just as comets and asteroids could carry the seed of life, so too could they carry the seed of death. And according to Hoyt and Wick-Ramasing, the reason why there were multiple plague outbreaks

throughout human history is because space kept lobbing disease bombs down to the earth. Like water balloons? Dude. Plague virus, plague bacteria was inside of meteorites that fell to earth. They cracked open. Some hungry medieval guy walked up to it and he's been like, oh, there's some good soup. And then he eats it all, he's got plague, he gives it to somebody else. You never know.

It goes down to the ocean. The fish got plague. All of a sudden, fish, the people ate the fish, which also technically, that was a myth that they believed in is that they were eating sick fish, and that's how they were getting the plague. Really? Mercury. Well, you can get ill from fish, though.

Maybe from mercury poisoning, but that's a new thing. That's modern times problem. Oh, fish didn't carry the plague, though. No. No, absolutely not. The thing is that what they were doing was actually killing more of themselves because the plague was coming from the animals, but they were not eating fish, would have actually would have been better for them if they would have switched to an all-fish diet.

A bunch of pescatarians would have been much better for the Middle Ages. Absolutely. I was going to say that. Who are you? I was. I was going to say, oh, actually, I'm sorry, I'm a pescatarian. That's Natalie. Natalie always says that she prefaces it before any meal.

She's just like, I know I'm a pain in the ass, but they call me a pescatarian. So she doesn't identify as one, but she can also exteriorize it, so someone else calls her a pescatarian. Isn't that nice. But even if the plague came from space, it still had to be transmitted from person to person once it crashed down to earth, and we now come to the actual organism responsible for spreading the disease, Xenosyla cheyopis. Cheyopis?

Cheyopis. I don't know. I don't know. Latin. Anyway, it's called the rodent flea. Yes. Now, we'll get to all of the which rodent caused what plague argument here in a second. I'm fucking, I'm already upset.

I'm upset because it sounds like if all of this comes from the rodents, they just needed a few beagles, and they would have snuffed it all out, and then the plague would have been gone. But most historians agree that the plague jumped from black rats, ratus ratus, over to humans through something as innocuous as sharing a flea. Big if true. The Latin term for rat is just ratus ratus. They got lazy.

It was one of the first animals that they found. Okay. See, rat fleas don't usually drink human blood, but if the plague kills off an entire rat community, the flea has no choice but to hop over to the next thing on the menu. And since rats tend to thrive wherever humans live, the next meal was more often than not a person. Nick, come to do that sucky sucky. I don't like it.

Get out of your plague. As far as how the plague was able to spread so far, the fleas didn't jump to humans immediately. See, a flea can go six weeks without feeding, meaning that by the time it said, fuck it, let's have some human, it could very likely be hopping out of a grain or cloth shipment that had traveled hundreds of miles from its origin point. And fleas also don't have a sense of time, so they don't get bored. Yeah. Thank God.

They're very good at the base, though. Red hot chili peppers. Travis, cut that out. No, that was fun. Please, if you could just miss a request from me. You're going to cut my flea joke out. Thank you very much. Very good at the base.

Red hot chili peppers. Just snip that out. Big Lebowski. It's very easy to lift out of. Okay. But even when the flea tries to feed after six weeks, it can't. See in an uninfected flea, the blood flows from the bite directly into the flea's stomach, making the flea fat and happy.

Just get all fat and sassy. Yes, the soup woman. Just like her, but if she was fucking chock full of blood. Oh, I see. Which she is. I guess she is, yeah. But if a flea is infected with Yersinia pestis, the bacilli will build up in the foregut and block the blood in its throat.

I can see how many times Marcus has done this speech on a date. Yeah. Just to stress test it, to glee in his eyes. And since the flea has no higher thought function, it just keeps biting again and again and again because it's constantly hungry. And since the infected blood isn't being digested, the flea turns into a mobile hypodermic needle that vomits plague blood into every single bite it makes. So you said you're from Texas or?

Wow. That's really amazing. Rancher family, you must really have a lot of trauma, I'm guessing. You're Malongo? Are you near Malongo, Texas? Oh yeah, I'm about two miles from Malongo to the north, but if you take I-45, I would go six clicks to the south, you can get to Prinka, you can get Glunkle. Oh, I love Glunkles.

I married the one that said tell me more. Wow. Isn't that sweet. But two to six days after a person was bit, the buboes began to appear on the body in the general area of the infection point. And death usually followed about a week and a half later. So while humanity has spent eight centuries, eight centuries, so much time, eight centuries spent eight centuries placing every bit of blame for the black death on ratus ratus and

the fleas carries with them everywhere, new theories have recently been put forth that suggest an entirely different culprit. I know what this is like, you put one screen door to submarine and every Polish person forever is maligned. It was an experiment, they thought it would be fun to maybe put a submarine outside of the water for once. The Polish are fun. The Polish are fun.

But eight centuries of propaganda have led to a story that I am incensed. I have a feeling the Polish might be blamed for this. See the black rat is an easy scapegoat because while I know they make great pets, we're going to get so many fucking emails from rat people. People love rats. People love rats. They're disgusting creatures out in the wild. Regularly feeding on both our garbage and our dead.

But that's just called influencers. Interesting. In other words, the black rat just makes sense when it comes to plague carriers. This is your just make sense version of the truth. But recent research has shown that it is very possible that the real carriers were not the disgusting creatures that we still have to fight back on a daily basis. They're lovely creatures some of you keep us pets for some reason. Well, they're very smart in their own right, but that's also what makes them so dangerous.

Instead, the real culprit might be amongst the cutest of rodents. Instead of rats, some now believe that the real culprit is the adorable, chubby, cheeked gerbil. Yeah, bro. What? This is about the gerbil fucking mafia, dude. No way. The Gerbil boss.

No way. The Gerbil boss. Yeah, they did. No, gerbils are used in butt play and they're just there to watch have fun. They tried to ruin Richard Geer's career and they caused the plague. No way. It's the gerbil's fault. I refuse to allow it.

I'm not even going to allow it. They've been lied to after. Gerbils are way too cute for that. Look at it, the gerbil's eyes, too black. Like a doze. Like a doze. Well, Ben, listen to the argument. Okay.

Looking at tree rings, the scientists involved in this relatively new study surmised that the worst plague years corresponded with wet springs followed by warm summers in Asia, which are terrible for the breeding of black rats, but are ideal for the Asian gerbil. Yeah, bro. Accordingly, each time the gerbil population exploded, the excess gerbils hitched rides with merchants to faraway lands, covered in the same rodent fleas that might have hitched rides on rats. Or they might have been gerbil fleas, but they're just as comparable.

They're just as comparable. It could be. You could just see the little gerbil like, where are we going? Hey, hey, me? Where are we going? We're going to cause thousands of years of death. Little gerbil, you're going to cause a bunch of death. Yeah, it's going to be a fucking middle.

Everybody's going to die, motherfucker. Yeah. My name's Mr. Jimchim. Mr. Jimchim the gerbil. This scientist say is the actual reason why the disease came and waves again and again throughout the centuries, because logic dictates that just so long as there were rats in Europe, the plague would have been a constant problem. But since the plague ebb and flowed, it all corresponded with explosions in gerbil populations,

therefore the gerbils may be responsible for carrying the black plague to Europe. All this time though, we've been looking at rats, right, saying rats are the cause. The one problem that they've been having with the rat hypothesis is that they're also looking for the giant rat die-off that would have happened to have led the fleas to jump to humans. And they haven't really found evidence of basically what people are saying, because there were piles and piles and piles and piles of dead humans, why were they not before that? Piles and piles and piles of dead rats.

Well, they have some hypotheses about why there were certain populations that might have been more resistant to the plague, where they got sick, but didn't actually die. But it does also beg the question of why did the fleas jump from the rats to the humans if there were still rats alive. That is the big thing. That is the big question. I don't, you know what my fucking big question is? Where were the fucking hamsters during all of this?

Oh, the hamsters are relaxing. They're running around on wheels. Hamsters didn't want to get involved. So hamsters decided to be neutral. And guess what? We know what they didn't do. You know what they ended up doing? They were controlling all the money.

They were controlling all the money. Like in Switzerland. Oh my God. That's exactly what they did. Hamsters fused in Switzerland. Do not make your allegories. Hamsters went on to do Kia commercials. They did.

They danced. Whatever. But that's not to say rats can't carry the plague. America's first outbreak of the plague, because we've actually had a few, that occurred in San Francisco about a hundred years ago. And that was caused by fleas riding the rat. And 122 people died as a result. Yeah.

That's sad. But guess what, man? Who says a rats can't? It's not what it's about. It's about that gerbils were in there too. And that's sure. Okay. So it's with all hands on deck.

Yup. It takes a village to kill an entire generation of human beings. Yeah, man. Because there's actually one more rodent to blame. And some people assert that this is rodent zero. The original carrier of the plague could be the Tarbagan Marmot. Damn Tarbagan Marmot. Tarbagan Marmots.

Yeah. The Tarbagan Marmot. They're natives to the Eurasian grasslands. And they were a favorite source of leather for marauding Mongols. Why do I feel like I have to take my hat off that I'm not even wearing and start stomping on it and just screaming at the heavens for a bad crop this year? Because you know how much I love my Tarbagan Marmot hat that I have and my Tarbagan Marmot shoes.

You've been going Tarbagan Marmot crazy. I am. You've actually been like, when's the Tarbagan Marmot fad going to end with you? Hashtag, Tarbagan Marmot fever, I am lit about it. Tarbagan Marmot. Not Tarbagan. Tarbagan. Tarbagan.

Tarbagan. Anyway. Your Sinia pestis actually lives on in this Marmot today. And the strain that the Marmot carries is the most virulent in the world. So much so that marmots are still found with bloody froth around their nose and mouth owing to a mnemonic plague infection. Or heroin overdose, man. Get an arcane in there, man.

Yeah, get an arcane if you can. And it's from these same Eurasian grasslands where the Marmot still frolics that the strain of your Sinia pestis that caused the Black Death originated centuries ago. And from what we can surmise, your Sinia pestis is a fairly new bacteria. It evolved somewhere between 1,500 and 20,000 years ago. And while it has all the infection agents necessary to kill everyone on Earth, it fails to do so because the basalae cluster near the infection site instead of spreading to the organs.

Whoa. What do you mean? Well, if the plague would spread to, like, say, the liver or the spleen, then the plague could be spread to every single bit of the body. The plague would become like the bubonic plague would become like the septicemic plague. Oh. But because it clusters in the lymph nodes, it doesn't spread to every single bit of the body.

And the fatality rate is 60% instead of 100%. So that's why they swell because literally they're getting filled with disease. Yeah. Yeah, clusters. It is really sad what happened to the domino spokesperson, Noid. He is now lymph-noid. He's back, man. He has cancer.

Yeah, it's lymph-noid. Lymph-noid's a sad-noid. That's tough. Yeah, it is. Imagine that ad campaign though when he dies of cancer. You're getting the sympathy points. Yeah. I won last rich.

That's that. You'd get a meatlovers. This right here. Thank you, lymph-noid. The other weakness of the plague is that it doesn't last long on surfaces, and it's and it requires a temperature between 50 and 80 degrees and humidity above 60% if it is expected to thrive. Your cineapestis, however, is still quite skilled at confusing the immune system.

And by the time the body begins to fight back, by the time it figures out what the fuck is going on, the pathogen has already done its job, and it's either do or die. Interestingly, if your cineapestis was better at its job, humans would not be the only animals gone from the earth. Over 200 major species would be extinct, and the earth would consist mostly of bugs, bears, skunks, and a fair amount of smattering of other animals. Exactly what the gerbil mafia wants. That's a fun little world.

We didn't need the bubonic plague to wipe out a huge amount of species. We did that. We did that. Cars. We did a lot of stuff. With a whole bunch of stuff. Oh yeah, great extinction right in the middle. Yeah, that's our job.

It's stinking monkeys. We're on top of the food chain. I think it's a great extinction, because it sucks, because it stinks so bad. I'm not letting a little thing called peppers run my life. These little gerbils, whenever I put them in tubes, they put it in tubes that I make with the substances that destroy this planet, this planet which we own, because none of us have to watch Pocahontas long enough to absorb it. Sure, pepper's the gerbil.

I do like that name for a gerbil, pepper, that's fun. It's wonderful. The plague is still killing animals today here in America, and Wyoming in 2006, four cougars were found to have died from the bubonic plague. It killed four middle-aged beautiful women who's just about to say something about the idea of how many Appletinis will not go drunk. Life from your grave. As far as plague outbreaks go, there have actually been three throughout history.

The Black Death was actually the second, and the third, simply called the third plague pandemic, killed 12 million people in India and China, starting in 1855. Ben, guess when it ended? 1973. You want me to be that wrong? 1960. Oh my God. Also, did you notice how they just got lazier with the names?

Yeah. There's like, this is part three, all right? I don't fucking know, what do you do? What do you do in a part three? They're tired. Give it to us. The plague comes again? All right, we're going to adopt a plague.

Now part three, we'll adopt you to plague. Now each time a plague pandemic hits, it causes gigantic upheavals in social systems, and will certainly be getting into how the Black Death helped create modern Western society later on in the series. But to show you just how consequential plagues can be, the first plague, known as the Plague of Justinian, had effects that shaped the world that we live in today, even though it occurred in the sixth century AD. I think that what is most, what is really interesting about medieval times is that they

have the same brain as we do. Yeah. So they are, it is us, but it's then. So it is really interesting to see how they are just as affected by what happens to them like we are. They have the same weird thought patterns as we do, and they have the same idiosyncrasies and they think about shit just like we do, except they had different contexts. Can you imagine if someone from this time, 600 AD, teleported to now and they went by

a place called Medieval Times that is now just a place where people go to have lunch and dinner, and then they're just like, you're just laughing, now you're having fun with this. Do you have any idea the trauma that this caused me? Every medieval person is ten times stronger than any current person though, because they're also trained to use the sword by the time they're seven years old. They all died from the plague and they're shit in blood, what are you talking about? They live a big 40 years.

The plague of Justinian spread through Europe and the Near East, but the hardest hit areas were modern day Iran and the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, which was ruled by the Roman Emperor for whom the plague is named as a part of the Eastern Roman Empire after the great Roman Empire crumbled. From what historians can surmise, Yersinia Pestis arrived in Roman Egypt in 541, and then infected rats hitched rides on grain ships sailing throughout the Eastern Roman Empire and beyond. By the account of historian Procopius, the plague hit Constantinople hard.

He claimed that 10,000 people were dying every day, and while that may be an exaggeration, historians still think that it could have been as high as 5,000 a day. It's just that the death is so public and so visible, like people running from their homes. Death was so ever present in Constantinople during the plague of Justinian that people wore name badges for identification in case they dropped dead on the street, and the air was ripe with the smell of rot from so many dead bodies stacked like cordwood on the streets. The plague of Justinian also made appearances in Italy and France, and in France, so many

people died that they ran out of coffins, which was sort of a moot point anyway because there weren't enough people left to carry those coffins. Now records are spotty, but we do know that by the year 700, Europe's population dropped from 50s to 70 million to about 25 million, and Rome, which had been home to almost half a million people in its heyday, dropped to a population of 20,000 by the year of 800. It's not just the plague, it's the fall of Rome and all that, but even so, it's fucking insane. The plague didn't help Rome stay together.

This is, again, we're going to see this. It's really interesting because people talk about the plague as if it had its own mind, like it was doing things on purpose because the way it would pop up and the after effects of what would happen after it struck, it always hinges humankind to this whole new thing. It helped bring down the Roman Empire. But that wasn't even the first plague to cripple Rome. Really the big one that brought down Rome was the plague of Galen, which was a small pox epidemic carried by Roman soldiers throughout the Roman Empire.

They found that armies were among the biggest plague carriers that there were. Some believe that this was the plague that actually killed Marcus Aurelius. We don't know for sure what killed him, but some think it was smallpox. The plague of Galen weakened Rome and set in motion the conditions that caused the great Roman Empire to fall. But more importantly, it set the stage for the spreading of a new religion, Christianity, which was just getting started. Then hundreds of years after the plague of Galen, the Justinian plague boosted Christianity

even further into the realm of major religion status. Because when the plague of Justinian was framed as punishment for sinful behavior, more people converted to Christianity. They flipped it into PR. From there, Christianity began to turn from a religion of love to a religion of fear, at least amongst the higher-ups. And it's that motivation of fear that we still have to deal with on a daily basis, the world over.

It's so strange to me, the idea that you would turn back to the religion that told you this is all our fault. When I want to go to a religion that says this is how we fix it, which is why my only religion that I ever really truly are subscribed to is the Plumbers Union. I agree with that. Nothing wrong with the Plumbers Union. The Plumbers Union, the only people out there, they're keeping the shit flowing. Sounds like they should have started worshiping the rat, trying to get on their good side.

Honestly, briberat. Briberat. Stop a gerbil. Stop a gerbil. Briberat. Honestly, if you have gerbils in your home right now, I want you to put them on punishment. Do not put your gerbil on punishment. Time out.

Gerbil. At least time out. It wouldn't understand a time out. It knows what it wants to do to us. The idea was that Christianity would fix the plague, is that they were saying that the plague has come because all of you are sinful and because there are still so many of you who do not believe in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Therefore, if you do convert, then the plague will end.

At this point, everyone's so afraid of dying. Everyone's so afraid of what's happening around them. Everyone's just so fucking tired of what's going on. They say, fuck it, I'll try anything, and so they convert to Christianity. And then the plague naturally dies out. It burns out. So you have a bunch of people who joined Christianity and they're like, we did it. Meanwhile, it's just because the plague killed everybody, it touched, and now you have figured

out to stay away from it and it naturally goes away. So back in the day, in order to avoid the plague, they went to Christianity, and in modern times, in order to avoid COVID, they watched One American News. So isn't that interesting how you just flipped your brain? You just flipped your brain. And all of a sudden, it's all different. Yes. It's always been that way, though.

I know. That's what's fascinating. Sixth century AD. Human brain does not change. It does not change. It does not change. Now, the plague of Justinian died out after about five years, and it didn't really return to Europe for another six centuries.

Now, it might be talking out of my ass here, but it seems like the plague eased up because trade and travel slowed down for a while. The Roman Empire isn't really doing the best business, so therefore, you don't have as much trade, and you don't have so much plague. Interesting. And you know Marcus was talking out of his ass there because you could hear the gurgle of blood as he tried to speak, because he's a leaky asshole. Oh my God.

Man. Is your butt have the plague? Do you have a butt plague? Butt plague. Oh, guys. I've been taking probiotics. Holy shit. It changed my life.

I've been shitting every single day, healthy, brown, and smooth. It's been wonderful. Probiotics has changed everything. I have heard so much about these damn probiotics since I've been in California. I'm moving back to North Dakota. Antibiotics. Which is weird to see. It's weird how it is the anti-biotics.

I know. But all of that changed with Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde. Apologies to Dan Carlin. Let's give him a Genghis. Of all of the good pronunciations, we will change. We should probably start saying Genghis just because Dan Carlin is what we stole our show from, so we now need to give him fail to. I like Genghis.

There's no problem with Genghis. But I just can't say like Genghis Grill. Genghis Grill, that works. Genghis Grill is different. Is it a restaurant? Yeah, it's a horrible restaurant. It's horrible. It's like a kind of, it's one of those restaurants that you go to where you pick a bowl and you

make a bowl and they cook it and it's fucking horrible, but you still eat it because it's kind of fun. You might as well go to the Bill Cosby Rib Shack. I mean, Genghis Khan is an international murderer and rapist and now we're just going to have me. Yeah, I don't, no need to name it after him to be honest. You know, fuck it. I'm going to go, I'm going to follow Dan's lead.

I'm going with Genghis. Got to. I like Genghis. Now, now Genghis Khan was one of the most infamous people in history. An emperor who ruled the largest contiguous empire in history through a brutal campaign of hyperviolence that lasted well beyond his death in the year 1227. It was really, it was bad for people. It was really very bad, but I love playing them in Civ.

That's also what's fun about this whole episode is I've just been playing Civilization throughout this whole thing. It's just so fun to reenact the plague, but you're the plague. Yeah. It is. I mean, anyone who, I understand times are hard for people living is difficult, but it is better now. Because you get to play it on your, and your little butt, you get to play.

Yeah. I get to beat back Genghis Khan's grandson with Ghosts of Tsushima. I'm a samurai, and I'm pushing the Mongols into the sea. Cool. That's what I'm doing. That's cool. Ghost is a fantastic game. If you haven't played it yet, highly recommend fantastic games.

You've been talking about it for months. Months and months? Yeah. But one of the consequences of Genghis Khan's reign was that in the 13th century, his people, the Mongols, revived an old trading route from China to the Mediterranean Sea called the Silk Road. And with a unified Asia under the Mongols, the literal path for Yesenia Pestis's march to Europe was established.

The entry point for the Black Death into Europe was a port city named Kaffa, now called Fiodosia, which is located in Crimea on the coast of the Black Sea. Today, Fiodosia is an ethnically Russian resort city, but back in 1347, Kaffa was a Genoan colony home to Europe's biggest slave market. Is it? Hmm. What's the name of the Star Wars market planet? Is it Tenduri?

Uh, the Star Wars market? You think it's chicken? Tenduri? Tenduri. That's a Tatooine. I mean, that's the desert planet. Are you thinking of Coruscant? No, that's the city planet.

Plump plumpkins? Are you thinking of Tatooine, the desert planet where, you know, Mos Eisley is? Kaffa, in my mind, if I want to describe Kaffa, it's the market planet from Star Wars. Oh, you're talking about Mos Eisley, the market city, yeah. Yes. Bloorbeams. Bloorbeams. Because Kaffa was this really cool spot, it was very international, very bleak also

at the same time, but it was this like hub of thought, this hub of trade. Genoa is a very interesting civilization to also follow because of their belief, the idea of we wanted to create this like, this very beautiful trade civilization. Now, Kaffa was in a centralized position in the Eurasian continent, and when the early bursts of globalization came between 1250 and 1350 as a result of Mongol expansion, Kaffa was perfectly situated to exploit the new trade opportunities. However, what Europe was largely unaware of at the time is that China, in the early 14th century, was experiencing a mini apocalypse.

According to what we know, China was beset by cycles of torrential rain and deadly droughts, all while swarms of locusts dense enough to turn day into night devoured their crops. According to legend, earthquakes then swallowed up entire cities and even mountains. And in the 1330s, the Black Death crept its way out of a region the Gobi Desert called the Mongolian Plateau, and people began dying in the millions. Apparently, though, this was all just an allegory because the Emperor of China had just canceled their favorite show, Yung Sheldon. Oh my, that's absolutely wonderful, absolutely fantastic insight, Henry, thank you.

The Black Death also could have come from modern Kyrgyzstan, where accounts of the plague going back to 1340 placed the origin point in a central Asian market town called Tallis, which is near several areas where the plague occurs naturally. But no matter where it came from, by the time the plague and the environmental upheavals were done with China, tens of millions were dead within just 15 years. And this is before the Black Death hit Europe. Damn, but word hadn't spread because also at the time, you're in a massive war with the Mongols.

The Mongols are ripping shit up, so they're pretty busy. Now concerning how unsure we are about the origins, an historian named Monica Green just published a paper last year that places the origin of the Black Death a hundred years earlier than what we've thought for hundreds of years. She traced Marmots and the Mongolian grassland to an outbreak in Baghdad in the year 1258. Be damned to gargantor Marmots! That means that the Black Death may have spent decades creeping from town to town, settlement to settlement, until it finally took hold in almost every corner of Europe, Asia, and

much of the Middle East. Oh my god, put some lamb's blood on your door or something, you gotta do something to stop this thing. Lamb's blood is what gives you food poisoning. What? Life from your grave. Now by 1346, the news of the plague had reached the aforementioned port city of Kaffa, and it's actually from an Arab scholar named Ibn al-Wardy that we have the history that

we do of the early years of the Black Death. In the same year that Ibn al-Wardy gave his accounts in Kaffa, Russians also began writing that the plague had arrived in port towns on the western shores of the Caspian Sea, and it had already begun to decimate the Mongol capital of Sarai. As far as how the plague came to Kaffa, and therefore the rest of Europe, it was literally flung over the walls by a dying army. This is absolutely out of control. The way that this started, I mean, it's a factoid you read about on like, Trivial Pursuit

type games, but to see it come about, like to actually walk it through, especially in the Great Mortality, is harrowing. See since the 14th century was incredibly violent, one of the biggest spreaders of the Black Death was war, and it was war that brought the plague to Kaffa. There's something about it that sounds so frightening, about the idea of, because they didn't know what was happening. They just knew people were getting sick. There were like, something, this fever, and they had no clue what was coming, because

it started happening a little bit in Kaffa, and then all of a sudden it just explodes. I don't know, man, you mentioned the Caspian Sea, and now I can't stop thinking of Latka from Taxi, Andy Coffin's character, where he's like, I'm from an island off the Caspian Sea. Can you imagine him screaming with lungs full of fucking blood, and he's dying, and there's a Dominican monk next to him, just like peppering, and it's going sooth, sooth, and then he fucking dies. It is how he died, dude.

Oh yeah, that's right. He used to go do all those weird things where they take chicken guts out of him, and he's like, I think I'm good to go back to act, and he's like, I don't know, dude. See, as we said, the Black Death comes from fleas hopping from rodents to humans, and rodents love war because it produces food from both ends, from the grain and meat fed to the living armies and the garbage they produce to the bodies rotting on the battlefield. So when the Golden Horde came to Kaffa to take the city, led by a grandson of Genghis Khan, they brought rats.

Rats brought the plague, and the Black Death, therefore, infected the Golden Horde. Wow. You know, there was a bunch of gerbils having their way with village women. I don't think that's true. I know what's going on with these gerbils. You don't know anything about the gerbil. The people of Kaffa settled into a siege when the Golden Horde showed up, but when the Mongols began dying outside the city walls in stunning numbers, the survivors began to place the

corpses into catapults to lob them into the city. Yeah, man. Honestly, if you do that, though, can I be alive just for the beginning? No. That'd be kind of fun. That's a fun way to die. I mean, you're going to die anyway. Might as well fly.

Well, they're melting, rotting these mothful corpses, because also, the Kaffas armies, they are, one thing that they did, they created these giant walls, because Kaffa had been raided several times. It's a trade city. So people are always trying to come and take all of the various from different countries, all the treasures and shit that are there waiting to be picked up or waiting to be sent out. And so they had these massive walls.

They were all stuck inside, and they knew, because most assaults of the city, it takes years. It takes one or two years to sometimes to conquer a city. To penetrate? Yes. No, to penetrate the city in a warlike fashion, nothing to do with your penis. But they're sitting there, and literally, one day the arrows just stop, and they're like, the Mongols aren't fighting us anymore.

We win, we win, because they thought literally a ghost army came, and the despoiler, Lord of the Rings, when all the army shows up at the very end, right? But then they look, and they're like, some Mongols look really sick, what's that coming over the wall? Oh my God, that's a fucking dude! And that's a thing, when this shit, like, because when these bodies are rotting, they are fucking, I mean, they are absolutely, I mean, they are falling apart. So when a body hits after a catapult fucking throws it in, it explodes.

Yeah, bro! So it's like two weeks after Halloween, the people who still have their pumpkins out on their front stoop, it's like that. But it builds with Plague Sputum. Yes. Now the Hordes, they weren't really thinking about Plague Sputum, they didn't know about Plague Sputum. They believed that the sheer stench of the corpses would be enough to kill everyone inside

the city walls, because it was pretty common at the time to think that smells were fatal. Logically, this kind of works. They never shared a studio with Ben Kissel. Wow! I actually don't stink. I have no odor. Now you're outside, you're outside doesn't stink at all, it's your insides, that's the problem, yeah.

Oh yes, because I don't have my probiotic. I think it's better to talk. I honestly don't think it needs any help, but it's called the miasma, it's the scent that can make you infected with disease. It's not that far away from the truth, I mean, they didn't really understand airborne diseases or germs. So basically this kind of works, because foul smelling things do tend to kill you, because yeah, that's why they smell bad.

Our bodies tell us do not eat that. I was just thinking of the bit that Kevin Barnett told about how he farted in that young girl's face and for a moment her entire world was just his ass, because there is poo poo particles in there. He would always mention that with farts, because I think they're kind of funny, but that's not funny. It's disgusting that there's poo poo particles in there, it's like, Kevin you're too smart for this world.

She could have gotten pink eye. I know, but also they used to think miasma, they thought that if you smelled fatty foods, you'd get fat. Some people also believe that you could catch the plague just by looking at someone with the plague. They didn't really, they were just guessing, there was a lot of guesswork involved here. But as we now know, it's not the site or the smell that kills, rather the corpses when they exploded, they poisoned the water supply and the fleas riding those corpses quickly

hopped to living victims. Now John Kelly's The Great Mortality has an amazing rundown of what was probably going down behind the walls in Kaffa during the plague siege, and to give homage to the Master of History podcast, I'd like to read an excerpt from The Great Mortality in the style of Dan Carlin. Well you're going to have to wait six months to release it though. Oh you got him good. It's with love.

Oh the way he works so hard and does all that research so when he does release it it's not a bunch of shit. I wait with bated breath, I love his show. If I could do it like he does it instead of the weekly fucking grind and actually look at it. One day Marcus, one day. As the death toll mounted, the streets would have filled with feral animals feeding on human remains, drunken soldiers looting and raping, old women dragging corpses through

rubble, and burning buildings spewing jets of flame and smoke into the crimian sky. The woulda been Saturday Night Live. The woulda been swarms of rodents with staggering gates and a strange bloody froth around their snouts, piles of bodies snacked like cordwood in public squares, and in every eye a look of wild panic or dull resignation. The scenes in the harbor, the only means of escape and besieged kafa, would have been especially horrific. Surging crowds and sword-wielding guards, children wailing for lost or dead parents,

shouting and cursing, everyone pushing towards teeming ships and beyond the melee, on the departing galleys, prayerful passengers hugging one another under great white sheets of unfurling sail, ignorant that below deck, in dark sultry holds, hundreds of plague-bearing rats were scratching themselves and sniffing at the cool sea air. Mr. Carlin, it is a delight to have you. Absolutely. That is a long-winded way of saying it was a stinky shithole though, huh? It just sounded like a nightmare.

That's most of history. I love it. And so, infected people fleeing the plague and the Mongols and kafa boarded ships to the rest of Europe, and in just four short years, the resulting great mortality would kill between 75 and 200 million people. Oh my god. That story is the first known recorded instance of bio-warfare, because, again, they did not know the full extent of what the plague would do, and I imagine if they did, maybe the Mongols

would have done it anyway and they figured maybe we'll run clean up, but when it comes down to it, they did kick off the entire plague, but they said the main thing too was seafaring is what really helped the plague go, because it did go across the land. My friend, you're talking about globalization, that's globalization is what you're talking about. Yeah, in some ways indeed it was. Joubles are the new globalists. Now, disease does spread when certain areas of the world go visit other areas of the world,

like the plague spread from China to Europe because of trade, and then smallpox spread from Europe to the Americas because of exploration, killing off that entire population. This just happens again and again throughout history. You know what's weird? I feel like we could learn something, but I'm not going to now. We don't really know how the people on these ships survived the 1600 mile siege journey to Sicily, which is where the Black Death truly began to take its toll on Europe. But John Kelly believes that might have just been luck.

Recent research shows that a certain genetic quirk gives some people protection against the black plague, just as some people have genetics that protect them from HIV. And it's quite possible the people who survived the siege journey were recipients of such a lucky gene. There's some people who believe that it is the gene, the gene that does protect you because there are people that are HIV immune and they come from a lot of this Western European population. And so they think that these people that live through ever this is, because it also could be whatever the hemorrhagic fever that they were talking about that could have been a

part of what the plague really was, that if they survived, then later on they would go to survive the other hemorrhagic plague that we barely survived in the 90s. But even though some did survive until they reached Sicily, the journey was still hellish. Again, John Kelly painted a picture of men turning on each other as the sickness began to show itself, resulting in daily executions, murders, and mutinies. Men became too sick to kill, then too sick to work. Once a sailor began showing a neck boobo, he was strapped to the helm to keep him away from others, and when another showed a bloody cough, he was lashed to the mast.

What is the… Well it just seems like you're adding more suffering to the situation. They didn't know what to do, they literally had a guy who was racked with fucking fever and then they have to tie him to the mast and he's just up there going like, you think maybe you could get me some soup or something, and they're like, fuck you, sickie! I mean, to be honest, he was the first car ornament. That's kind of nice, I'm just trying to rip him off at night. Remember the plague takes anywhere between two and six days to set in, so the guys that

got lashed to the mast or tied to benches or whatever, those are the guys that got sick after two days. The guys who got sick after six days were left behind to wander the decks with pants stained from where their anuses had started to bleed, and they were constantly followed by the rancid smell of pus oozing from the plague boobos that had popped when the fucking shit pitched and they accidentally racked themselves against a big chest and it just went, plop plop plop plop. Okay, Barry, just tell me the truth, is the shit showing on my ass?

It's just showing through my pants, it smells like I just shat myself and I can't, I don't know. Can I be honest with you? Yeah. I think you might be entirely covered in shit. That's what I was afraid of. Yeah, yeah, it's on your skin, yeah, that explains it. Those that died on deck were left to roll around as the waves pitched the boat from side to

side, and when the ships finally arrived in Sicily, the people at the dock were met with mangled dead bodies that had burst upon a rail or the mast, showering the ship with black blood and rotting intestines. That's where you just need one, maybe a Polish man, short and stout person to take his leg and just push the ship back to sea and say, oh, thank you for coming, bye, and then just get it out of there. Well, because they ran, they thought that they were just running from the attack, so they showed up, basically being like, we hope everything's okay, because they said word

ahead of time, essentially the Mongols that were attacking us were leaving, at the same time they've left with all of the sickness, and they said the people that emerged from these boats, it reminds me of the Donner Party episode where they went to go define the children and they saw them all come out like ghouls, it was like that, the hold of the ship opens and you just have a bunch of people ravaged with plague, just being like, help me, help me. It's like in fucking RoboCop, when that guy gets doused with the acid, it's like that. One of the best, one of the best deaths ever.

However, the black death would not have been able to annihilate Europe as thoroughly as it did had Europe not been in a particularly vulnerable state, because, as I can't stress enough, the 14th century was the worst century to be alive. I mean, really, the only people that are having a good time were probably the people living in the Americas, because they were completely cut off from all of this. They're not all the weed, bro. No, they're just fucking, dude, peace pipe explaining to each other how they can't own rocks.

They're having a great time. I mean, of course, their worst plague centuries are coming a couple of hundred years after that, but they still miss the black plague. Oh, we'll get them. We need to listen to the Native American. We are guests in this country. Now, for our purposes here, we're going to give the gerbils a pass, Henry, and focus on the black rat, Rattus Rattus, as the carrier of the black plague.

I assume that they have the same attributes, kind of. Yeah. Well, while the gerbil may have brought it, the rat certainly did their job of spreading it. Now, Rattus Rattus feeds on human garbage and refuse, and the fleas that ride those rats are attracted to dirty people, and pretty much everyone in medieval Europe was absolutely filthy all the time, by modern standards, at least. See, early Christians considered bathing to be a vice, because they feared that sitting

naked in a tub of warm water might cause impure thoughts to arise, and they would therefore not be able to resist the temptation to give the old friar a stroke. Folks, folks, listen to me here. I'm Alex Jones, circa 400. Water's making you gay. Water's making your kids gay. Water's making the frogs gay. Are you gay?

Am I gay? I wish someone would love me. Well, you know, I guess bubbles, they do look like titties and balls. You could say that. Wow. I'm starting to think this Christianity thing is just a little bit of bullshit, but it's weird because the upper classes would bathe, and they would show it as a, because, again. Once a month.

Yes. But that was a big one. Once a month. How are you, can you just imagine trying to have a fun time, I'm just going to say it, muff dive it. Of course. I'm just imagining what that is like. Medieval England, they talked about how the oftentimes you'd go to be bathed, so it was

weird because prostitution was also legal. So you could do certain things, as long as you were paying for it, it was cool, and if you went to a location where it was okay to do it, it was cool, it was still technically a public chain, they didn't want you touching yourself, but somebody else could jerk you off. They were right about the prostitution being legal, but then you also, the key to that is being clean. Yeah.

Well, in London, it was actually only legal on one street that they called Cucklain. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh Cucklain. I walked down that street back where it's hoping to get a lucky. That's great. Now the boner fear eased up a bit by the Middle Ages, but the Christian world was still scandalized when word got around that King Edward III of England had bathed three times in three months.

That was his handsuit. Like scandal. You know. This is the king. Oh, the king. Oh, I'm taking bath. Three times in three months. It was also soap at the time was made out of fucking pure salt, so if you soaked yourself

too much, your skin would fall off. Like that's why all the bragg women from back in the day, they always take gimpy limbs and they had pink rotten fingers. Furthermore, most medieval Europeans didn't change their clothes more than once a year, which of course attracted more fleas, which brought more plague, but one of the biggest causes of plague was the European city itself. Medieval European cities were horror shows from the moment you walked into the city gates, particularly the English ones.

If you were to stroll into York, for example, you'd see the blackened, rotting heads of criminals and traders displayed on poles next to arms and legs riddled with maggots and flies hanging by ropes. Oh, Jesus. Well, this seems like a great place for a comedy club. Honestly. They're going to need to laugh. They're going to need to laugh.

Once you were inside the city walls, you'd be trudging through what they called evil-smelling mud everywhere all the time, unless of course you were in the walled off religious enclosures or the part of the city that held the royal castle, which that royal part and the clergy part, that took up half of the city together. Logs of human shit filled every crevice of the medieval world. I'm actually going to defend the mud here because it's just like, I'm not evil. I'm just stinky. I'm just dirt.

It's like, it's not necessarily evil mud, per se, because the other fucking threw dirt under the fucking bus, too. The other half of the city was where everyone outside of the king and the clergy lived, and most of that was taken up by the wealthier citizens. What was left to the majority of the population were overcrowded, thinly walled, highly permeable homes that were easy targets for the many plague-infested rats already on their way. But concerning that evil-smelling mud that I mentioned earlier, it was evil-smelling because nine times out of 10, there was a fair amount of shit mixed in because every

city had a literal river of feces flowing through it. And a river runs through it. It does. And in Kent, this river of shit was actually named Shitbrook. Shitbrook. I do like that these terms are still around today. This is recent history in many ways, kind of recent. I could sort of see our ancestors, like specifically Kessil and I, be the guys that their jobs

are to mash the shit with polls, which was a job. We'll get into that in a second. We'll be talking about the people. That was an actual job with a title. I'm actually going to say this. All three of us would just do turd races, where you take a shit and then you put a little flag on it. You're like, that's Kessil shit.

That's Henry shit. That's Marcus shit. Start shit and then see who wins. Which shit wins? You've got to make your own fun. You have to make your own fun. It's like you're in solitary confinement, but it's global. We will eventually get to, I believe, episode three.

We will cover the most famous comedian of the time. Have you read anything about Cola? Yeah. The funniest man during the play? I can't wait to hear those bits. If he copies, if he fucking talks about gas pumps not working. No we're about to talk about shit a lot, but that's because dealing with the logistics of shit was a large part of every medieval city-dweller's life.

Ideally, a person in Kent could shit in the toilets on the city bridge while they were out to work for the day. You actually tried to time your shit around the time you were around the bridge so you could shit in the toilets that then plop down into the river. That makes sense to me. I time my shit about when I'm close to home. Yeah. Yeah, naturally.

Yeah. But most of the time, people shat in chamber pots in their house. And once the pot was full, it would be dumped out onto the street in shallow open gutters that fed to a central dumping point, which was usually a major river like the Thames in London or the Seine in Paris. In London, you actually had people whose job it was to keep the river of shit flowing. The people up top were called the Beatles. There's some shit over there.

You're gonna have to get that, or sling that, all right? What do you do? You breathe on it? You blow on the shit to get it moving? What the hell do you do? I am an executive. My job is to... I legislate.

I delegate. Very nice. Great leadership. Now, the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy of feces were the Rakers. Yeah, I shouldn't have logged in my job because it's simple. All I gotta do is get to shit, and I beat off the fish because I say, they ain't food fish. That's shit.

But the fish don't know. They ain't all the fish. They ain't all the shit. It's shit, yeah. Yeah. You're eating shit. Yeah. Yeah.

The Rakers' actual job was to walk around the city and dislodge stubborn turds from the gutters. Someone had to do it. And if a dead body happened to end up in shitbrook, it was always a tragedy. If a dead body... How'd you end up being an oldie, gaggot? If a dead body was to end up in shitbrook, it was also the Rakers' job to dispose of the shit-covered corpse by, again, tossing it into the river.

Oh my god. Hey man, it's in the river. The river. It just goes away. It goes away forever. There was so much shit everywhere, all the time, that sanitation legislation had to be passed where, legally, people had to shout, look out below three times before they tossed their cold buckets of piss and shit directly into the street.

Oh god, what a horrible fucking time to be alive. Wouldn't it be kind of fun to toss the shit? Yeah, once. That would be once. Dude, you're going to get some on your fingers, though. Of course. I already do. I don't.

Because all the hairs. They need to add this to the Medieval Times exhibit. Like, I'm sick of these actors fake fighting. There should be one big shit dump in the middle. One big shit dump in the middle of it. Oh yeah, the Renaissance fair shit pile. Yeah, it has to happen. Where you go and visit the shit pile.

Yeah, now with the new term, what was it, the hashtag photo dump, that's all I think now. These rivers of shit. It was shit was actually such a part of life that French, Italian, and English cities named entire streets after human waste. In Paris, you had roue merdeux, roue merdélé, roue merdosson, roue de merdon, and roue merdier. And that's all just variations on the French word for shit. Mill.

That's incredible. That's poetry. Beautiful language. It's a beautiful language. That actually sounded quite romantic. Paris even had a piss street. They called it Rue du Pipi. They called it the fucking Pipi street.

That's fun. I mean, hey man, after a good night at the bars, every street's a piss street. Can we do a live album from there? Can we just go and do, like, live from Pipi Street and we walk across Pipi Street like it's Abbey Road? And England was no better. They had a shitbrook street. They had pissing alley.

It was all there. It was all there. But by accounts. At least you know where to go. Yeah. That's why they did it. Like, it's where to go and where not to go. Absolutely.

Don't piss on the fucking Alamo, man. Go piss on Piss Street. But by accounts, perhaps the worst place to live in the 14th century and the place where my ancestors likely lived and died during this time period was London. Oh. Now medieval scholars are always quick to point out that London in the Middle Ages was not as disgusting as people like us make it out to be. You guys always joke a lot, but it's not that bad.

It's just because you've got a whole fucking avenue that you shit in and everybody's dying and it's just this entire slave class that we hate to death. It's horrible. And while I'm sure it wasn't all shit rivers and rat dungeons, it was still by any modern measure revolting and cruel. Like, concerning the cruelty, let's just talk a little bit about the humor of the medieval times. It's my favorite.

According to the Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, the height of humor in the 14th century was sarcasm, but sarcasm was reserved for the upper classes. For most people, the funniest thing in the world was hurting other people or watching other people get hurt. It still works. It still works. For example, groups of children would lay nooses on the street and when some absent-minded passerby forgot about street nooses for just a second and stepped in the draw, the children

would pull and hoist the man up by his ankles, bashing his head on the way up. The boys would then demand a ransom from this man, and all while the entire neighborhood refused to help and in fact pointed and laughed at the poor man's misfortune as their entertainment for the day. That's Twitter. It makes sense. Also, my favorite game I saw was that they chose the dunce for a day. It was a guy, they have this one game that they used to play where one guy's chosen and

he's allowed to kiss anybody's wife, right? So he's allowed to. This is real. This is real. He'd go and he could kiss anybody's wife and all day long he'd go kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss and at the end of the day, the fun part was everybody's whose wife he's kissed was allowed to beat the living fuck out of him. This is real.

Where they would do a group beating where he's like, oh, it's funny, guys. It's funny you're doing this and they're all laughing and enjoying it. There was also another thing that they would do for fun to raise money for the parish where they would just kidnap people with burlap sacks. Like on Mondays, men would kidnap all the women by just tossing them into burlap sacks and carrying them away and then on Tuesdays, all the women would get together and kidnap all the men in burlap sacks and carry them away. It's like a Sadie Hawkins dance.

Why do I feel like medieval times, we were just more us? You know what I mean, like we're so authentically human than we are now, like now we're lying to each other. Yeah. You're onto something. Yeah, maybe. But the funniest concept in medieval England to the vast majority of people, and this was upper classes and lower classes, and this shows that things don't fucking change much.

The funniest thing to them was the idea of a young woman cuckolding her elderly husband with a handsome young man. That story made people laugh every time. So sad. I guess. As far as the further disgusting parts of medieval London went, Londoners were beset every day with the stench of rotting vegetables, dead fish, and animal entrails. When the streets weren't runnin' with shit, they were runnin' with literal blood from

the many street slaughterhouses that dotted London. As a result, rats were absolutely everywhere in London, along with roaming packs of wild pigs that refused to go away no matter how many times Londoners tried exterminating them. It's like American tourists. Come on, everybody. Get out of here. Adam, again, got myself to do the meat. You did it yourself, yeah.

But it's not like any of those Londoners were actually eating any of the meat that the slaughterhouses were producing. Most peasants lived on boiled cabbage and bread, while all the meat went to the upper classes. And we now come to the three estates. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, remember, this is sixth period. You're back in 11th grade. I think I maybe took this in 11th grade.

I'm 11 PTSD, dude. Marcus, you gotta teach, Kissel, about feudalism. This is really important. You're not the real teacher. You're a substitute. Oh, no. You're not a breakthrough. You understand.

You got a charm, Marcus. Yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. See Medieval Society had three sections that the people on top claimed were created by God. The three estates were those who fight, which was the aristocracy, those who pray, which

was the clergy, and those who work, which was almost everyone else. And guess how the percentages broke down? I can't wait to hear. Basically, those who fight protected those who work from men in other countries and cities who were those people's ones who fight. And the clergy made sure that everyone went to heaven. Oh, on our behalf, isn't that nice? They got to go to school.

I love it. The one nice thing about the erosion of the middle class is that there is no buffer from the port of the wealthy, so we'll look out. Absolutely. And they would love to bring back feudal times, because what we did this time during this plague, our current plague, they decided to take the worker class and name them essential. And they gave them this, like, fun little, we did the pots and pans and we applauded for them while they worked themselves to death.

Yeah. And then they put a lot of people out of work and made them feel worthless. Mm-hmm. Well, at the top of those who fight, you've got the king. And below him are the lords, dukes, orals, and barons who carry out the king's orders. The clergy is pretty similar, although the papacy at this point in history is a fucking mess that we'll get into later. Among those who work, the peasants, there's also a hierarchy, with the people on the absolute

bottom being the countrymen, those are the people who are born into sheer servitude. Above them, you've got the serfs, who are forced to work their lords' land three days a week so they can obtain the privilege to pay rent on a piece of land. Oh, thank you. And they go. Thank you for the opportunity to pay them. And they could only leave if the lord gave them permission. They're also called villains.

Villains. The workers were called villains. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That is actually fascinating. Yeah, but it's spelled differently. It's spelled E-I-N-S. E-I-N-S.

Yeah. Doesn't count. Then it doesn't count. Now most peasants were serfs, and they weren't technically slaves because they could own property and were considered free men in the eyes of the law. But the black death was about to come and wipe this whole system off the board. And one of the few examples of the plague changing the world for the better. Okay.

But outside of the three estate systems, you had, actually, we would not be in the three estates. We would be outside of it. Because that's where you had merchants, doctors, lawyers, and entertainers. Mm-hmm. Yes, it's us. And that includes, yeah. Well, we're certainly not fucking doctors or lawyers.

And that includes jugglers, acrobats, and gestures. This is the first time there was anything sort of like a meritocracy, even though there wasn't. Because it was still about money. It was really about if you made enough money, especially as a merchant, or somebody that was an artist, like a famous artist that had a really powerful patron, like somebody that would pay for you no matter what so you could just show up and be a fun guy, right? Sure.

A real question. So you're a great juggler. You got all the balls up in the air. How do they pay you? Is this a... A patron chooses you and says, essentially, you're my fucking juggler. I'm going to pay you to do juggling because I like the way you juggle, the way you juggle represents me.

That would be like a lord or a duke. Maybe. Or a merchant. This is the merchant class. This is the first time it came out. So we started to see the feudalist system start to kind of change a little bit because it changed again by money. Because once you had enough money, you could essentially look, dress, and act like you

were aristocracy without the family name. Sure. But even though this exploitative system was in place for the majority of Europe, things were still looking up before the 14th century from a purely biological point of view. Sometime in the year 800, Europe entered what was called the little optimum, which is a period of minor global warming that caused agriculture to thrive and it resulted in a burst of technical innovation that changed the world. We've let Marcus go into his nerdiest rant that he's about to do at the very end here

because this is Marcus explaining and exploring the world of medieval inventions. I am actually fascinated. This is... You're doing a good job, young Ben Kissel. I'm on my ADD medication, perhaps, but I am focused. I am focused. He put down his water bottle full of gin just so that he could listen. This is fascinating stuff.

This is how the smallest things can change the entire scope of human history. First, someone invented the horse collar, which redistributed weight away from the animal's wimp pipe in an increased horsepower by a factor of four. Another person invented the horseshoe, which improved the horse's endurance. And this is the fucking most fascinating one. Someone else invented a new plow, which allowed farmers to till heavier soil. And because they could till so much more soil, they had so much more room to grow food. Because they had so much more room to grow food, people lived longer.

Women would lose five babies instead of seven. And so, as a result of all that plus favorable weather, the European population tripled from 25 million to 75 million between the years 1,000 and 1250. I knew this was also going to come as soon as I saw the word fucking agrarian. Every book, because they say agrarian again and again and again, which I still don't particularly understand what it means or what it is, but I assume that all of this is agrarian business. It's very much agrarian, yes. It sounds like it.

But that increased population also resulted in an explosion of trade. In the year 1,000, people hardly traded outside of their small communities. But by 1280, cross-continental land routes connected Europe to faraway lands. And since the population boom came with absolutely no plan on how to deal with all these people, turning places like London from a Roman ghost town into a thriving, disgusting overcrowded metropolis, nature corrected. It started to sound like a gerbil. After the Black Death took humanity down a peg or two, it would take parts of Europe

150 years to bring their populations back to pre-plague levels. And it's with the plague itself rampaging through Europe country by country that we're going to continue our tale of the Black Death next week, starting with the great famine that made it all possible. No one's ever said the words, great famine, so excitedly before these next two episodes. The next two are basically going to be about how many ways a human can scream and how many different places a person can scream and die and what happens when they scream and they die.

We're going to see how humans reacted to this plague the same way we as humans reacted to COVID-19. The way we reacted to Ebola, the fact that the same kind of AIDS, the way we reacted to AIDS. Absolutely. Denial. Partying. Family annihilation.

Blame it on butt stuff. Straight up. And we will, I can't wait for you to see as much death as we've already seen just as researchers. All right, everyone. Well, thank you all so much for listening to this episode. Absolutely interesting, fascinating, and another reminder, history repeats itself. We are, we're not maybe the greatest timeline, didn't see that on my 2021 bingo, but we are

living in a nice time. No, we have antibiotics now. Yeah. Which is great. And apparently probiotics, which are evidently very needed for the human dummy. They're wonderful. It's brown, it's smooth, it's big, and it's regular. It's so much shit.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. But it's happy. I love it when he describes his shit like they're Dotsons. All right, everyone. Well, we can't wait to see you. We'll see you in Grundy. Oh my goodness. That was too easy.

It was too easy. It was too easy. We'll see you in Red Rocks. Red Rocks, because that's what Marcus had before the probiotic. He had Red Rocks. It is asshole. We can't wait to see you in Colorado. It'll be so much fun.

So we're super excited. And yeah, just keep on supporting all the shows here on the LPN Network. Thank you so much for your support. Do we have any, we have, Henry and I will be traveling a bit around California to go sling some sweet vape weed. I don't know when the time is, but on the 24th of this month, we're going to be down doing a meet and greet at Weedon, which I'm very excited for. We're going to be peddling our wares.

Speaking of the merchant class, we are the both the juggler and now the merchants as well. I'm very, very excited. We will announce that time very shortly. We have, I don't know when we're going to announce all of the rest of our dates for 2021. It should be sometime soon. Very soon.

We have anything else we got a fucking sling. I got, I got to say, we have released the final episode of our series on the Beastie Boys over at No Dugs in Space. Nice. Six parts to this series. If you've been waiting until now, until the entire series is out to listen through. Now is the time. It's out.

It's available. We're very proud of the series. We worked our asses off on it. Carolina did a great job of research on, on this whole thing. She learned the history of hip hop for this fucking episode, for this series and it's a fucking insane how hard she works. She can do the fun thing that we have to do every, every, each and every week where you download a bunch of information and then you delete it.

And then you also don't remember like important dates of your life or, or memories of like old friends and shit. You delete those too. It's weird how that happens. Oh, and the big thing is to remember no last stream this week, we're going to be out of town. We're going to be in Red Rocks. So we're not going to be able to do the stream.

We'll be back in two weeks. Okay, indeed. All right, everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you're happy, healthy out there, not- You don't have to fucking plague, so I guess everything's cool. Plague not surrounded by a bunch of rivers of human flowing shit. Let's just be thankful for what we have today.

Okay, everyone. Hail yourselves. I keep my shit in a bowl. You're disgusting. Hail Satan. Hail Gade. I just let it sit. Don't let it sit.

Oh, it's having fun. It's on vacation. Flush the toilet. Hail me. How many bowls? Don't even do this. How many bowls do I have? This show is made possible by listeners like you.

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