Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 460: The Black Death Part V - Mark Of The Beaver

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

On the final episode of our Black Death series, we explore the "Kingdom of the Rats" and find out how the rivers of pus and blood and puke finally stopped for Europe's beleaguered people. Also, we detail the ways in which the Bubonic Plague left its indelible mark on human civilization.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

There's no place to escape to this is the last time on the left That's when the cannibalism started My mental Mori, baby It's time to remember that you are gonna die This is the most metal-fucking ending of the series, dude Lucky, get into it, man Awesome Welcome to the last podcast

I love chunky Ozzy on the Oz boys Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everyone I am Ben, hanging out with Henry And of course, Marcus Parks Today's episode, this is the climax of a long, disgusting road of blood, guts and pus We are on to part five of the Black Death Yes, yes, yes And please, Ben, do not forget the blood mixed with the vomit

You know, man, I actually want to publicly apologize for forgetting that Thank you I am sorry, Marcus, and I am sorry, Henry The blood and the vomit Did I tell you what, man, this trip, this whole saga has taken me from lutes to flutes Now I'm listening to, I listened to some Bard Corp But last night, I got deep into folk metal I got Skyclad, have you ever listened to Skyclad?

I never have But I did see some great folk metal, I saw a great folk metal concert at BB King's a few years ago Can't remember a single fucking band that I saw, but they were amazing The Widdershins Jig The Widdershins Jig Widdershins Jig If you want to go out there, like, can't imagine better music to watch an entire village die too Yeah

Yeah, I saw some folk metal band open for tear, like, many years ago And it was fucking insanely fantastic It was like, six, it was a medieval, like, quartet standing next to like two Scandinavian metal guys Fucking shredding the whole time, some girl that's seeing it in the highest register possible Yes, that's great, I do love it I will say I ordered several tunics, because I wanted to do a bit of a medieval photo shoot To promote, you know, people love my body Of course

And they're delayed, what the fuck is going on here? Another result of the current epidemic Wow, you are a victim You're a victim in every way One of these days, the jerkin industry will recover, Henry, and you'll be there right at the beginning It's been 800 years Okay, can we get to the Black Death part five, please So when we last left the Black Death, Yersinia Pestis had entered England through port cities in the west

Like Bristol and Weymouth, which was actually called Malcolm Regis in 1348 I was partly correct I mean, you know, we just don't, I don't want to take anything from Weymouth Anything because, you know, apparently they have a very nice amusement park And it's one of what I, one e-mailer said it was the nicer beaches in England If you could call what we call beaches nice Well, isn't that fantastic, and it's one of the nicer ones Wow

And the plague had been carried to the island on ships that had been fighting the Hundred Years' War with France Now, the plague certainly killed quite a few people in those cities and in various towns as it made its way east But the English city that would bear the brunt of the plague, both in 1348 and in the last big outbreak of the second plague pandemic, was London Can we get a big bell sound here? Can we get a bell sound? I think you just did it I also wanted that I thought was interesting about the shit, all the booty coming back from the Hundred Years' War And how that also helped spread the plague

So how do we talk? You said shit and booty Shit and booty People going and getting like the prizes from war, like people brought back the spoils of war People brought back the fashions of France, because that was the height of medieval garb was in France at the time And so people would go around in these unwashed Parisian dresses, fresh from dead, raped women And they just went all the way through France and stole all of this shit and they're wearing it and they are very proud to show off all of their new fashions But they're covered in fleece So because that's what happens when I guess fashion is pain

When you shop at your goodwill, make sure you gotta kind of spray some stuff off, perhaps there's some bugs in there and whatnot But why do they call it the spoils of war? Because it seems so fun and fresh, doesn't it? I think when you hear spoils, you're like they just brought home a bunch of rotten tomatoes or someone's grandmother Why is it called spoils? I don't know, that's a bad question It's actually a really good question Also sort of making a joke, also kind of just talking I don't fucking know

There might not be an answer I'm sure it's some sort of arcane use of the word spoils and probably our modern term spoils, spoiled spoils Probably comes from that spoils of war I have no fucking clue, now I'm just talking Now it's a good point because if you're spoiled, maybe you had too much and then you're spoiled and you're spoiled rotten I want to start right now by saying first of all, all dictionaries are made up Words are made up, letters aren't real But we still have to find a way

That's the only way we can communicate Nothing's real, there's no objective truth There is some, there is some Now while we've gotten a bit of guff for really hammering home the squalor angle of 14th century Europe There can be absolutely no arguments surrounding the amount of filth and feces that covered London for centuries And still Yeah The principal sewage dumping ground in London was the Fleet River

Where all the private outhouses emptied out And it was sometimes filled with so many turds That ships couldn't pass through its waters Oh my, I've seen a lot of turds in my day I've never seen so many god damn brown logs in my life Can you imagine the turd that sank the shitannock? Oh, shit burger head But those are just the outhouses near the river

Other privies emptied their toilets into cesspools And those became so full that one turd wrangler named Richard the Raker actually drowned in one after he accidentally fell in Oh no, I dropped my night guard in there Oh no I better get down and go man oh there's all these other night guards in here Oh god You're gonna want that night guard for later Do you remember when you dropped your, when we were on the road Marcus

And we stopped at that Burger King and you had your Invisalign braces And you accidentally left it at the Burger King bag and then you had to go through the trash dump to look for the But they were in the bag Yeah they were in the bag And she was right on top there Yeah I was not in any way grossed out It was you that I had to calm down I was very upset about it

I was grossed out Well it was weird scene when your best friends you know kind of just shuffling through the trash at a Burger King And then he pulls out the thing that's so intimately next to his gums And then he just kind of padded it on his leg and he's like ah it's fine And he just like sucked it back in It was fine It was nothing happened It's got an old west, he's got a whole western bloodline in him

That's 2021 Yeah Now London in 1348 was relatively small When the streets were empty it took only 20 minutes to walk the city from end to end But during the daylight hours that same small space was crammed with 60,000 people Along with an equal number of chickens, cows, dogs, cats, oxen, geese and horses And as John Kelly put it, all of this mayhem was all compressed into lanes barely wide enough for a fat man to turn around in And you know fat men love to spin

Well they have to As far as where the action was and therefore where the plague spread You had places like the shambles and Butcher's Row And these two places together were essentially a shopping mall and a slaughterhouse right next to each other And both were filled with toothless, stinking, screaming Londoners This is back when people were really people That's right, that's tough I remember that

I like that It sounds like a dangerous place to be a chicken though Because they'll just grab you right off the street and cut your head off And next thing you know you're being fed to the masses Any chicken within 15 feet of me is in a dangerous place I agree with that I actually recently unearthed a plague sanitation station I didn't know you saw that

They saw it is this stone It's this little opulence And I guess it would start being proliferated throughout Europe Where it would have vinegar in it Like a pile of vinegar in it to encourage people to sanitize their hands as they walked throughout their day Much like we got going on right now So everyone smelled like vinegar as well I mean vinegar is better than liquid shit

Is it? Yeah I love vinegar If everyone smelled like vinegar I'd be fine with it I think they also smelled like liquid shit though Yeah vinegar mixed with liquid shit Yeah it's that thing of like if you mix five pounds of shit and five pounds of ice cream You just get ten pounds of shit I think about that every day

And they never make my order at Cold Stone And I've said shit on that ice table Shit on the ice table And they just refuse to do it You gotta go to France Yeah Speaking of toothless Londoners Back in the Middle Ages

People believed that toothaches This is just a little aside People believed that toothaches were the result of tiny worms eating into your teeth And the only fix was to burn a sweet smelling candle In the person's mouth to draw the hungry worms out Hear me out, hear me out everyone Toothbrush Hear me out

You guys think a toothbrush might work What? I have a product here it's worked on mine I think toothbrushes are gay Oh my god But also because they thought that They thought worms resided in the body at all times And that when we died that the worms were then just released

Oh like they said you break man from Nightmare Before Christmas Man we were really almost there Like the 14th century is when humanity was just almost there on everything Yeah Now apart from the shambles You also had Cheapside Which is home to 4,000 individual market stalls Hundreds of musicians and beggars

Countless rogues and scallowags And 14th century celebrities Like the great sea captain Sir Walter Manny And Canterbury Tales author Geoffrey Chaucer Oh very nice You mentioned how it was full of musicians and beggars As if they weren't the same person I think it was beggars who were singing

Desperate, desperate for attention But if you got a song you don't need money Because you got rhythm in your pockets And you got drums in your pants Man you're really figuring out how to be a producer But the busiest place in London behind Cheapside Was the Thames Riverfront Where ships from every nation came every day

To trade from the dock But at night that harbor became In John Kelly's words The Kingdom of the Rat The Kingdom of the Rat That's really cool That's fun What a fun time to be a rat

It's not a fun time to be a rat I guess they are on charge The rats are totally dominated Oh also a bit of an update And this is why we did a fifth episode It was because there's another person implicated here What? Apparently

Honestly this is kind of a shock to me I don't like fucking with a hustler I don't like fucking with a hustler's game I don't want to fuck with somebody who's super, super busy But apparently It seems to be new evidence has come to light That 5,000 years ago the first evidence Of why Pestis came from, yes

A beaver A beaver A beaver Scientists have found the earliest known strain of plague In the remains of a 5,000 year old hunter-gatherer They think that he was bitten by a beaver By a beaver Because he's got the beaver mark

Be very careful that body has the mark of a beaver Mark of the beaver Is there any evidence that it came Do they know why Pestis isn't any sort of beaver Did they just say a guy got bit by a beaver And they think that just because he got bit by a beaver That's what gave him why Pestis Let me throw some science words at you

An analysis of samples from the man's teeth and bones Revealed that he was likely the only one among those Buried with the disease Researchers reconstructed the bacteria's genome Using genome sequencing And believed the bacteria was likely part of a lineage That emerged roughly 7,000 years ago Which is, oh wait

I'm looking at this article and I don't know how they know it was beaver fleece Alright, very good answer by Henry But they're saying it's a beaver They're calling it a beaver And I don't know why they're doing it But honestly now we have to too Well he had the mark of the beaver So as London slept each night

Thousands of rats descended on the city From ships that came from all over Europe Bringing plague from the water As the black death marched from the west To bring Yersinia Pestis by land This plague in the water This plague in the water That's a great song, DMB

Now when the plague first hit London In September of 1348 The country attempted to keep some semblance of normality The royal courts didn't stop And tax collectors kept collecting taxes Oh my god, that's so sweet how they kept the normality How they just heard like Yes, everyone's devastated, no one has any money

But we don't want to mess up their... We don't want to kerfluffle the flow Yeah, you don't want tax man They actually had a stock market there Where they sold stocks to put people in And you don't want to affect that You don't want to affect that Well at this point in time

Remember that England is engaged in the Hundred Years War with France So there is a lot of money That has to go into Gwip and France's ass And remember this is a hundred and sixteen year war So that's where the taxes are going And that's why they have to keep collecting money Not have to, but that's why they are collecting money Back then they had a lot of money invested in drone warfare

It was just a man with a blindfold on being led in With I guess a bunch of playgrounds I mean I feel like you could have distracted A whole French military wing with just a couple of ducks and hats They love such fun stuff It used to be a very willing and intense adversary of the French Yeah, the French used to be the most feared adversary in all of Europe They were number one for hundreds of years

Okay Tell a different group of people to come around Oh, you're talking about your people You're talking about the fucking Germans You're talking about what happened, what your lineage is all stamped with But that's the thing is that King Edward He was paying a lot more attention to his war with France than he was the plague Because remember King Edward had already lost his daughter, Princess Joan, to the plague in France

Before it had even reached England So his reaction upon the plague's arrival in London was more apathetic than anything else He just didn't fucking care But as more and more people died, apathy turned to fear And the beloved king fled to his palace in the countryside Several kings did live One thing I found interesting going through the great courses was how many ruling bodies died almost entirely from the plague Every single one in this country, I believe the Council of Twelve was almost completely wiped out in Italy

I think what they were was called the Council of Seven in France I'm not quite certain if that's the actual term They're all fucking dead They killed everybody on the up top too Which almost been nice to see senators that afraid You know what I mean? Like watch them all scurry and run That would be really fun to see You can watch it

It just happened recently I know The New York Times did a great expose on the January 6th right as a matter of fact Check that out if you want to go on to YouTube But senators scared, it is something that happens It's nice Yeah Now unfortunately we don't have as vivid of accounts of the 1348 London plague as we do from say the plague in Florence

Because London produced no great plague chroniclers What? Well we do have Yeah they just didn't It was so strange to me Isn't it weird? It ripped through the writing class It ripped through the clerical class really really quickly

So then some people had guys that had the forethought Like I need to write down all of this shit that's happening But it just ripped through ink Right Yeah What we do have though is a short eerie account from a man named Thomas Vincent He wrote that London was beset by a dismal solitude With closed stores, empty streets, and a deep silence in almost every corner of the city

By his account the only sounds were the groans of the sick and dying Punctuated by death knells endlessly emanating from churches They really did talk, several people mentioned that in England That that was the soundtrack And specifically London London crying and pain He was going all night And then here in LA the streets were deserted

And the moans were people starting their only fans accounts Isn't that nice, very very exciting Having fun Very nice, very good Now as we said last episode London did make some attempt at treating their plague dead With as much respect as they could muster Even on days when carts usually reserved for manure

Showed up full to the burial pits That's all they had That was the only thing big enough to carry all these bodies Well I mean I guess we are literally bags of shit So it's just shit kind of carrying human ba- Human bags of shit so it's still full of manure We're just piles of shit that can get diplomacy Yeah

Now on those days if the line was too long And the body had to be held above ground for a day or two The bodies would be stuffed with charcoal and ash To slow the putrification process Because remember a lot of people believed the plague was spread by smell And once the body was ready to take its place in the earth It would be laid in a trench in a casket or a shroud Side by side with thousands of other bodies all laid

With their head to the west and their feet to the east Sorted by gender and age when possible Because in England they did really try Specifically that's what you see in accounts Is that they tried to have respectful burials for the dead And not just dump everybody in giant plague pits I mean can't I lay with a woman even when I'm dead Why are you gonna separate us by gender

They should have gone with one boy, one girl, one boy, one girl They're going to have fun and then they can procreate little skeleton babies Well in England and actually across all of Europe The one thing that the plague actually did was really create will culture Almost you could say, like the idea of saying Make people like really understand You need to figure out what's gonna happen to your body And all of your shit after you die

So people did start making more specific requests About how they wanted to bury So you can be buried 69 style Whatever woman that's near you who also dies in your neighborhood If you want to, Kissel And then she also requests that Yes That's great, well Puffin has no choice

Jerry has no choice Good dogs So that's great When you mentioned will culture I would not get what you were saying But then I was also like, I make lids look good I make this grave look good That's what they tried to do that

And they would dress you up in your finest The bust of you dresses your finest in the very top Did they really dress them in their nicest clothes They did, I mean in London they really did try As hard as they possibly could I mean they tried harder than some people did here In fucking New York last year There was just, they're passing naked musician beggars

Give them the clothes, okay When I'm dead My clothes will go to the largest kids around I don't care Now you cut them up, you fucking clothe the whole family Sure You have to seal those huge kids riffling through your mansion After you die like your seven-easer Scrooge

Nice How did he get a size 14 sock? My neighbor died Well now I put my lunch in it Now legend had it that certain plague pits Like the cemetery in East Smithfield Buried 200 corpses per day during the Black Death Which would have put London's mortality rate

At a stunning 65 to 80% Dang Today however The estimates at East Smithfield are closer to 18,000 bodies Which puts the estimated mortality rate at London At little less than 50% Putting the post-plague population at 35,000 Down from 60

Oh my god That's just low enough for a politician to deny its existence I don't know Now as per John Kelly's assessment The plague in London, both in 1348 And the later outbreak of 1665 These things left imprints on the British DNA For example, this is an excerpt from a chilling poem

About the discovery of a plague ship Written a couple hundred years later Called the Black Death of Virgen Sad the search and fearful finding On the deck lay parched and dry Men who in some burning blinding climb Had laid them down to die Hands prayer clenched that would not sever

Eyes that stared against the sun Sights that haunt the soul forever Poisoning life till life is done Aye aye aye Oh dear, dear Aye aye aye No, those are some fucking slayer lyrics, man I'm not sad enough

Sight that haunt the soul forever Put an inked life till life is done That's awesome I mean really sad and devastating But that's a really good poem That's a thing that's metal though at the same time No, the entire poem is beautiful It's very long, but it is absolutely

It's a gorgeous poem, The Black Death of Virgen By Lord Dufferin Oh, there also was sort of a Sort of at the time urban legend It's kind of come out now And there's some truth to it To the idea that the plague Throughout all of the island of the UK

Like through England It destroyed entire villages And that entire villages would be gone They called them ghost villages Essentially like we call ghost towns Where they said that they would show up And you just see animals Like one donkey walking

And that the entire village is dead And now they're saying they don't know If that's completely true But there are some evidence that shows There are these like uninhabited spots Where they like it seemed like Five or six houses were built up Maybe a small market

And then it just got got everybody In a hot second Yeah, well I mean Well as I always said last episode It was like a lot of those towns What they think happen now Is that those towns were kicked In the stomach real hard by the great famine

And then the black death And came and just finished them off And then there's also the straight up thing Of people running Because that was also We saw it again in 1994 There was a plague outbreak in India And they talk about one of the big things

That happened again Again, fucking six hundred years later People heard the plague was coming And they just went to the big cities They just heard their way like Oh no my buddy got plague It's time to make a trip to China town Like they literally went straight to downtown Delhi

And they were very lucky It was only five thousand cases of it It's like five hundred dead Now the black death by no means stopped in London Rather it blew right through And carried the plague to East Anglia Which prior to the plague Was the most populated region in England

East Anglia is one of the places Where the plague mortality averages in England Were raised Because while the country had an overall Mortality rate of thirty to forty five percent East Anglias was devastatingly higher Norwich for example lost seventy percent Of its population during the black death

And that's confirmed Fourteen thousand people And in one manner Twenty one families out of fifty Were cut down like so much wheat Behind a swinging size The Reaper of Nights Man, it would be nice if the Reaper

Up out with some farm work every now and again No, no, no, this scythe is for show, bro I'm too many on the farm, dude Reaper, it seems like you're kind of a pussy, bro No? Yeah I have allergies, dude But in Norwich, people were not as precious

With the dead as the gravediggers had been in London Nor were they as cruel as the sinister Petini and Florence Instead, the bodies were so numerous in Norwich That they were treated almost like dead livestock By one account of a doctor People tripped over the dead in the streets And an endless stream of manure carts

Could be seen tilting loads of corpses into huge pits While the stench of putrefaction palpitated through the air Can I ask a true question? Why not just get a bunch of lighter fluid? I know they don't have it But why don't they just burn these bodies? Because they thought that the air coming from it would kill you That would be the worst possible thing to do

In their mind, that would be the worst If you wanted to kill the entire city, that's what you would do But I think that would be wrong, though Because it feels like buying them Correct That would have been the best thing to do Yes Because, technically, it allowed more rats to come

And the fleas and all of a sudden you got a beaver there Jerking off in the corner Him and his buddy and other gerbils there Just fucking doing whip and saying Like, tonight's gonna be the fucking best night of our lives That is the drug a gerbil would do They're crazy, but they also can cook a little bit That's ratatouille

I know Ratatouille's fake I didn't watch it It's not real I haven't seen it, but Well, one story of familial near extinction in Norfolk A woman named Emma Gosselin was engaged in a dispute With her husband Reginald over her dowry

And she'd taken her husband to court to settle the problem No idea what the problem was, though I mean, honey, we're going through a massive global pandemic Do we have to argue about the shoes right now? Seriously It was a fucking exclusive drop I had to get these shoes Yeah, I just don't

I had to get these shoes Everyone's dying, babe I know, I know And that's why the shipping's slow But, you know, I gotta get these goosebumps High tops, man You better By records, Emma had planned to bring several witnesses

To testify on her behalf For whatever her reason for taking her husband to court But when her court date finally came Just a few months later Emma Gosselin showed up alone Because both her husband and all of her witnesses Had all died of the plague since Dude, this chick had this so planned out

And she fantasized about the judge crying Looking at her with sympathy The knife is gonna be sweet I can't wait to get out of this And then everybody dies She was going to destroy her husband one witness At a time And she didn't get to do that

It is very difficult to have Stella get her groove back During the bubonic plank Yeah, that's too bad That sucks The groove is decidedly gone No more grooves are all filled with dead bodies As far as how people treated each other In England during the Black Death went

They were mostly free of the anti-Semitism That had infected mainland Europe Instead, England was awash With a rogue's gallery of scala-wags Who took advantage wherever they could What is the legal definition of scala-wag? Believe you, Rupert Or a popper-don't-er

Oh, a popper-don't-er A popper-don't-er as I thought As a father who took his liberties with his children I don't I think a scala-wag is somebody who's... A scoff-law? More like a scoff-law Yeah, scoffing the law

A scala-wag Oh, here we go The scala-wag definition A person who behaves badly But in an amusingly mischievous Rather than a harmful way Arrest them That's not true

Scala-wags were from Clockwork Orange Those guys were a scala-wag And they killed and did a whole bunch of horrible stuff Yep I think that's the modern term for scala-wag Back in the 14th century You didn't want to come into contact with a scala-wag Scala-wag's gonna fuck you up

Steal all your money Absolutely They actually called white Southerners Who collaborated with the Northern Republicans During reconstruction scala-wags Well, isn't that nice? Huh So maybe that's now

We can just take that as a term of like Yeah, I'm a scala-wag Yeah, cool Yeah, fuck If you want to identify as a scala-wag Go for it As far as these scala-wags went There was one day William

Who was a priest Who robbed people six days a week And celebrated mass on the 7th It's a fucking premiere television show Six on, one off Yeah, yeah You also had Henry Annes Who specialized in scamming people

With bogus tax fraud schemes Specifically, Henry told people That he had a full-proof method For avoiding the death tax on inherited properties But he would only reveal this method If the customer agreed to a heavy price It's always been here, man I know

I'm just thinking of the guy Who I know is actually a good dude But the dude covered in question marks The guy in the suit Oh, Matthew Usko Yeah, he's not But wow, that is amazing There's still entrepreneurship

Even then, isn't that nice One woman named Alice Bakeman, for example Gave Henry one of her best milking cows In exchange for this hot tip Now, of course, the tip was always bogus But by the time the tax authorities saw through the ruse Henry Annes was always long gone Now, I got this new cow to fuck

Isn't that nice But those were the more clever thieves Who operated during the Black Death Most thieves, like William Siggy Simply operated in a manner that today Will be more accurately described As meth-head crimes Oh, very nice

Copper stripping Well, yeah, dude Being late to doctor's appointments You mock And you laugh at the copper stripper But they make a lot of good money And it ain't easy to do Dude, Siggy stole pots and pans

From dead neighbors' cottages Altered the boundary of another Dead neighbors' farm to expand his own And he regularly stripped the lead From other dead neighbors' roofs Like so much construction site copper Wow This guy had it all worked out

Right now, he would just be on a show Called Extreme Moonshiners Extreme Black Plagers Exactly I'll make this plague look good This next one This is the Extreme Black Plager Catherine Bugsy

No one knew how Catherine Bugsy Survived as long as she did But her specialty was stripping the clothing From the plague dead And reselling them Spreading even more plague I'll tell you more secret Are eight fleas

You eat fleas Okay, tolerance Oh, you look serial Yeah And I'm looking to bought my tongue No kisses there That's what I call them No kisses to beg my frow

It seems to work Were there people who were not susceptible To the plague? Catherine Bugsy, apparently Because we see obviously with our More recent social experiment Of what we've had going on Some people just straight up

Don't get the new virus You want to hear a quote that comes right out Of fucking 2021 from 1300? This is from the year 600 The plague of Justinian And the same shit that we're dealing with now Whether by chance or providential design The pestilence strictly spanned the most wicked

Oh, so Miss Bugsy, not very good No, and there was also like we talked about last week That someone had written on the walls I think of Bristol That was like only the dregs remain That was what people wrote over and over And over again during the Black Death Is that only the worst people

Survived until the end of it Alright, take a look at yourself You're shitting your own Freaking intestines out of your ass Right now and vomiting everywhere So maybe you're the dregs Whoa Whoa, wow

Victim blaming I'm not victim blaming I'm just saying Just because I'm not sick Doesn't mean that I'm lesser than you Well, I mean it was mostly they were looking at people Like Catherine Bugsy Who was stripping dead people naked

And then spreading the plague to other people They shouldn't have buried them in their nicest clothes I don't know why I have to do that I don't know what happened You turned into a puppet I mean other than the resale Without the washing You just saw your little kiss

The resale just actually transformed He's like wearing a suit He's got a little bow tie His hair is put into a pompadour What happened You just turned into Tucker Carlson Of the Black Death $100,000 for 15% of your company, Miss Bugsy

Well, I mean the reason why they saw this is because And I get it because the good people tried helping Like they tried helping the sick They didn't want to abandon people to the death And they didn't run So of course all those people died And other people that were just the absolute fucking worst Were the ones who survived till the end

And now we know that the Black Death Is also one of the main inspirations for Billy Joel's Only the good die young Isn't that nice? Yeah, when Catherine Bugsy was finally arrested With a dead woman's leather jerkin She's the picture of health The picture of health for 13 hundreds and 19

I got two tapes too That's amazing, no one else has any Fuck this woman Absolutely rabbit gal, two teeth Now eventually the plague began to make its way North, where it ravaged Yorkshire Amidst a small peasant rebellion That occurred when the labor class

Refused to pay fines amidst all of the widespread death And by what some people say could have happened The Black Death very well may have stopped in Yorkshire And not crossed over to Scotland Or at least not crossed over in great numbers But when the Scots heard that a horrific disease Was ripping through the hated English They became convinced that this was specifically

An English problem that couldn't affect the Scots Yeah man I love the drunk logic of the Scots I blame beer Yes, this is just such a... In fact the Scots were actually laughing At the widespread devastation They thought the plague ripping through England

Was the funniest fucking thing they ever saw And they were swearing by the foul death of England And eventually this jubilation turned into Pig-headed overconfidence No way Not the Scots And in 1350 the Scots amassed an army Near the forest of Selkirk

Fully prepared to invade England And take it as their own We're gonna get it boys, I'll get the whole damn thing And they were like, it's true They created a massive war party And they all got hammered They're all like, we're gonna fucking get No, we're gonna get them tonight

They're all slapping each other in the face Fueled by Iron Brew And they all believed that they were immune from the plague That they wouldn't get it Look at this cool little fucking... I got so excited, my neck is expanding Like I'm one of those dangerous... It is

You remember that, look at that, I'm a Diploceros Yeah, looks like you're choking on a big egg there What's wrong with me? I don't know I must be hungover before I start to drink Yeah, I think that was the problem Yeah, they thought they were immune Just because they were Scottish

And the reason why the Black Plague... You gotta love it And the reason why the Black Plague Hadn't just like ran its way up through Scotland Like it did the rest of England The reason why it was a little slower Was because Scotland's fucking cold Like it doesn't have...

The weather is horrible for the Black Plague But the fucking Scots on the border Before they could even wage one attack The Black Death found its way into the Scottish camp Oh, man 5,000 Scots very quickly died on the border While the rest, infected and carrying plague rats In their wake, retreated

All while the English followed and killed As many Scots as they could Because it's definitely like, go, go, we're going And then 5,000 guys die Time to go home We gotta go here too Man, I can just see the Black Plague Having to go to that store

And get a little Black Plague jacket And a little Black Plague hat So they can go into Scotland Because it's so cold Those that survived the battles with the English Brought the plague to Scotland in large numbers And killed a large chunk of their population When there was really no need for them to do so

Although it did only kill a third Of the Scottish population Instead of like, you know, up to 45% Because it was cold So the only reason that it even affected Scotland at all Is because they went to it to yell at it And then it was just like, I'm a virus I don't, it's bacteria

So it doesn't matter, it doesn't care He probably would have gotten there anyway Because it did eventually go with trading routes So it would eventually get there, I imagine Because it did go all over Europe So it would have gotten there But they definitely accelerated it Sorry

Oh man, I'm gonna start I'm just so happy men are still like in leadership roles Nothing has changed Nothing has changed, nope This is like the biggest super spreader event Of the Black Deaths Where they're just fucking taking it And going back all over to fucking Scotland

And just dropping it Every fucking place that they go to That's so dumb As far as Ireland went We know that the death rate for Anglo-Irish Was about the same as the English And now we have no idea how many Of the native Irish died

But from what one 17th century Irishman wrote The pestilence made great havoc Among the English invaders But for the true Irishman Born and dwelling in the hilly countries It's scarce, just saluted them Oh, isn't that not cool It depends on, because it depends on the cycle

Of where you live, it depends on where you live Right, if you live out in the boonies It's difficult for it to transfer As quickly, because if it gets to one village It kills everybody and then it doesn't spread anywhere If I was the Black Death I would leave Ireland alone, it's nice Go, have a nice settle there

You know, and then you go attack elsewhere Oh, that's where you retire Yeah You know what's funny Is that, Henry, you mentioned last episode about If you want to survive the Black Death You get on a boat in Scotland and take it to Iceland That would have worked for 50 years

Because for some reason Iceland's Black Death, like their Black Plague Happened at the turn of the 15th century And half of their population died in like 1400 And then, 100 years later It happened again, and people are still kind of baffled As to how it happened They're really not sure, because there's no

Because the Black Rat never took hold in Iceland So they're not really just not sure, like How the fuck did this happen twice? And how did it happen 50 years after? It's beavers traveling on logs It's a very possible beavers one Yeah, it's possible But right around the same time that the Black Death

Was entering the homeland of my ancestors in England It was also taking a toll on Henry's ancestral land of Poland Although Poland's death toll was much, much lower Yes, it is one of the curious things It is one of the curious things Are you about to brag about the Polish people? Are the Polish immune to disease? Yes

You know what does it? The vodka It really stiddles the blood No, the survival of the Polish is over-accentuated Because it seems like the rest of Europe The problem is the rest of Europe, it was 40 to 60% Killed at the mortality rate In Poland, it was like 20 to 30%

But mostly it had to do with, because they were cold And there was one theory that I saw That it's because Poland had a lot of cats Oh, honestly, that could save the day Although, when the fleas hop on the cats Hmm Interesting Fuck!

I mean, they were Fuck! I don't know, because I don't know if the same fleas, the rat fleas Are the same as cat fleas, we don't know We don't know They don't trade back and forth And also, there's some talk that the Communist Party That ran Poland for a long period of time

All the kind of shit that went down obviously After World War I and World War II When everyone was doing their black death research In various countries were going through to looking Over historical records The communists didn't want to do that So there is also some things that they say That maybe the numbers were also missed

Maybe the numbers were miscalculated Because they weren't researching it Not in Poland, nothing would be miscalculated in Poland What I think is most interesting about Poland though Is that their king, King Kashmir Had a Jewish mistress named Esther And the king therefore offered asylum To Jews fleeing persecution in central Europe

During the black death Those Jewish refugees settled in Poland And established communities that would remain unbroken From the 14th century until the 20th When the Nazis almost wiped them out for good Partly by using the same basic conspiracy theories That had driven the Jews to Poland in the first place Come and join and have a ticket to the Kissel party bus

In his pit of a party on the bus That would be a true party bus My goodness, if you're Jewish at this time It's like, we have an answer, you're going to be safe You guys have a one trip, a one way ticket to Poland And you're just like, wow this is great I just know I can't wait to go to Poland It reminds me in Wisconsin

The Hmong help us fight the Viet Cong and the Vietnam War And many of them were sent to Wisconsin Which again, is a bit of a culture shock In both mood and temperature It gets quite cold But during the black death in Europe It wasn't just the regular folk dying at a plague We mentioned this a little bit earlier

Spain actually lost its king in March of 1350 When King Alfonso XI contracted the deadly disease During a siege at Gibraltar Making him the only European monarch to die of the plague Yeah, we got one Wow, that's actually a fairly impressive number Well it's because they were far away from all of it And a lot of times they went to their vacation palaces

Or like the Clement VI He actually was trying to fix it And accidentally stumbled upon shit that worked Furthermore, there is evidence from several accounts That Spain was actually host to the deadliest, scariest And fastest acting form of the plague The Septicemic plague Briefly covered in our first episode

The Septicemic plague is 100% fatal And kills in less than 24 hours guaranteed And never became widespread Only because of how fast it kills the infected It turns you into raspberry jelly Oh, that doesn't sound fun One tale told by a French cleric said that the priest Was visiting Spain on a pilgrimage during the plague

And stopped at an inn That night he ate dinner with the family at the inn And sensed that nothing was amiss The next morning though, when he called out for assistance He received no answer And when he searched the inn He found that the entire family had caught the plague the night before And had died before the sun rose

Oh my god Septicemic does it that fast Yeah, and there are a lot of stories like that Now some countries like the Netherlands Were somewhat spared the worst of it Losing only 15-25% of their population However, the reason why the Netherlands only lost 15-25% Was because the Netherlands had already lost more children

Than any other country during the Great Famine And therefore had less vulnerable people Again, worst century to be alive But it doesn't ever stop, never stop it It really doesn't As far as Scandinavia went It was sparsely populated and of course cold So the plague had a hard time traveling from town to town

But it was still said that if a Scandinavian did catch the plague They didn't live for more than a day or two After they started vomiting blood Implying that it was the mnemonic plague That haunted the northern reaches Can you imagine how much the fucking that stank to With all the weird pickled herring they eat and all the clams All that fish guts

Coming up with your vomit plague blood That's a lot But then Scandinavia also had Pesta The plague hag That idea of the plague hag Because we talked about plague virgins last time I actually saw, I had someone send an email Comparing it to Corona Chan

Remember the beginning of the quarantine We talked about the idea of the physicalization of COVID Into sort of an anime girl The plague virgins like that This is another story of the plague hag Which is this idea that you'd see an old woman ringing a bell And as she passed through town Everyone would die of the plague

But actually that was the retrofitting Of after everybody normally died in the village of the plague Whoever lived would ring bells to be like I'm still alive, come get me But then they were just like you did it And then they would probably kill her Just let her die, hit her with a rock or something Oh my goodness

Well in Norway, King Magnus II came up with a novel And somewhat innocent idea to fight the Black Death Ben I think you're actually really going to like this one You are going to like this one Let's hear it, let's hear it out He instituted theme days I think that's actually one of the most brilliant ideas I've ever heard You don't even have to go into those themes quite yet

But I think right now if I was that man's If I was that dude's chief of staff I would say sir let me suck your dick Not your cheese day Come up with that Everybody's favorite decade day Everyone's favorite decade They hit, remember the 80's day

Yeah the 1280's Yeah it was great because the serpents were president I love that What good ideas are we talking here There was foodless Fridays Oh that's sad Well you could have bread and water But just no fish or meat

Oh okay Or grant, yeah but you could have better water Then there was shoeless Sundays Easy going, that's actually nice Yeah well you weren't allowed to wear shoes to church I don't like the idea that I've not been allowed to I think it should be optional but okay Easy like shoeless Sundays

Oh no this is very much mandatory This is absolutely mad Does God have not got to kill you Well yeah he believed that this would He was trying to appease what he believed Was a wrathful God And he was trying to spare Norway Of the faith that befell his warmer neighbors to the south

And as far as he was concerned It did kind of work because people in Norway Didn't die in as high numbers As high percentages as people You know south of them did So this guy really thought that the sky Cuck in the clouds God was going to just own

Why would God want to see our feet on Sunday Is God just jerking off to us Looking at a fish on Friday Why I just don't I'm starting to think that these are human institutions This was an actual movement throughout a lot of Europe What they would do is mass prayer days One of the big things at the church

Because at the time it wasn't really the Catholic church They just called it the capital T, capital C, the church They wanted to organize mass prayer days Where every single person would meet And do something like ten times a day Where they would pray to be saved from the plague Pray for their monarchy, pray for the clergy Pray for everybody, their idea was that

If we just keep pushing God We will get this going We'll do a GoFundMe We're going to get this petition that God signed And then he's going to end the plague And so there was a lot of mass movement So he thought that if he did a coordinated Like, hey God we're sorry

We're sorry, like in one voice That maybe God would cancel the plague I'm just going to say this on behalf of humanity For all of time We've never deserved any of this shit All humans have ever wanted to do was eat and fuck That's all we've ever wanted to do Kissel, human beings are not innately horrible

That's real wisdom Internalize that You are not at fault for COVID-19 You're not at fault for the plague No, no, no, I mean people are still doing this shit You remember the COVID preacher, the guy that just screamed and yelled And people made those awesome fucking metal remixes of it Yeah, people are still, they still do it today

Well they definitely didn't stop eating on Friday I'll tell you that No, no, it is food full Friday Yes it is From Scandinavia, the plague crossed the Baltic Sea And re-entered Russia Where it swept through Novgorod and Moscow Incredibly, the plague had now come full circle

And was just 700 miles north Of the formerly besieged city of Kaffa Four years after a Mongolian siege Had sent plague ships from Kaffasport to Sicily There was one thing I read that kind of Sent a shiver up my spine and said, if you look at the line That the plague made around Europe You could see the noose it had drawn around the continent

Interesting, it's sort of like when Bruce Springsteen He started in New Jersey And then he went to LA and was like But then he realized his true love was in New Jersey That woman that he married and then he went back to New Jersey And it's almost like he made a noose around America Yeah, yeah, yeah, Springsteen's The noose tour

It was a horribly named tour Yeah, I was upset, but I still went He performed for eight hours I've seen him Marcus, we're going to see Springsteen Sure I don't know when, but we're doing it Bruce Springsteen's concerts actually have a mortality rate of 45%

The last time I saw him, he played for 14 hours But after four years of constant death Europe found that the deadliest strain of your synopsis To ever exist had somewhat anticlimactically Burned itself out What? People very suddenly stopped dying by the thousands And in fact weren't dying of the plague at all

Or at least not the horrifying, bloody, pus-filled, gangrenous, blood vomit plague But when people were ready to accept that the great mortality was at an end They reacted in much the same way that people are reacting today They drank heavily, spent lavishly, ate gluttonously, dressed extravagantly And fornicated with abandon They said in Italy they created 52 new religious holidays So they were like, we're adding vacation days to the calendar Great

We're just doing it That is very interesting Also the beliefs, the inner worship of almost like their version of comic book heroes Have you done any research into the 14 holy helpers? No The 14 holy helpers were the plague saints that kind of came about The very end of the plague People started praying to hyper specific certain saints

Like Saint Sebastian The guy that's like, you see the one who's tied up with all the arrows in him The BDSM saint? Sure And they would create these sort of frescoes and paintings of these saints Fighting like skeletons and demons that were essentially the personification of the plague So I think it technically is the first comic books Okay, yeah, makes sense

Well perhaps the most overt act of life over death Symbolically at least after the plague Occurred in Orvietto, Italy Where couples actually fucked on the grass that had been laid over the recently closed plague pits I mean, anytime you walk in Washington Square Park You're walking over a massive grave Everywhere you walk is a massive grave I am happy these people are having a fuck party

Getting lit, eating food Enjoy it while you can It helps create the earliest forms of gonorrhea Oh no good news of that night That's true That's wonderful When the words of one chronicler from Sienna No one could restrain themselves from doing anything

But even though people seem to be having a great time This was in fact a reaction to being deeply traumatized Shut up, Marcus I'm not traumatized Honestly, we're not as traumatized as they were I'm not just feverishly having a good time for no fucking reason You do need to have fun You do need to have fun

But a psychiatrist named James Westfall Thompson noticed That the way people behaved after the black plague Was exactly how people in the lost generation behaved after World War I In his view, the behavior in both was marked by Fairly superficial waves of gaiety, debauchery, extravagance, and gluttony All done to try and tamp down the unimaginable horrors That they'd all seen and experienced And I would assume the same didn't happen after World War II

Because the horrors were no longer unimaginable Right And of course, let's not forget after World War II The buffet was invented And once you have the phase Then it's very difficult to have sadness You could serve yourself You don't have to deal with the tyrants of chefs telling you how much you can eat

Yeah, they look at you when you ask for seconds And they're like, this isn't your mom's house And you're like, well, you know, I wish it was But my mother's dead Yeah, my mom's a fucking corpse Anyway, that's why you gotta go to your golden corrals But perhaps building off of this so-called moral decline People found that they also didn't need the church quite as much as they thought they did

Once it was all said and done See, the decline in the church's power after the Black Death Was both literal and symbolic Since the plague killed peasant and priest alike The church came out of the Black Death with seriously thin ranks And the priests who had survived were either highly corrupt, very young, or poorly trained And in some cases, all three They had a very secure track that you were supposed to be on

To be a priest, to be a member of the clergy You were raised, and most of the time you had to be of noble lineage To even be able to be on the track to be educated In order to go and be whatever your position was going to be within the clergy Sure But once it wiped out all the noble families, then anybody could be a priest And the problem is that when anybody can be a priest Most of the time, it means scumbags are going to be priests

Which Twitter did to the celebrity class Yep The general public had also taken particular note of the fact that the church had given no help That couldn't have been given by any other person Finally, it was mostly the dregs of the priests who survived And those left behind charged unreasonably high prices to serve a local church So it's just, it just left a bad taste, the church left a bad taste in everyone's mouth They failed miserably and killed a lot of people for no reason

And then, obviously, once they realized that, once people realized there's, they don't provide the safety net they promised Well, fuck them Of course Philip Ziegler is the historian that was kind of talking about how this was They think, there's several historians that believe that if the black plague didn't happen Medieval world might have continued kind of closely the way it was already continuing for a long time But that this doubt in the main church is probably what planted the seeds that would create the Renaissance And the Reformation

When all Protestant religions would also become about Because this just showed, it showed a light into how corrupt the whole system had become Absolutely But really, the end of those four horrible years was just the end of the beginning of the second plague pandemic And it was just, it just happened to be the worst one out of the hundreds of plague outbreaks all over Europe in the centuries to come It was great, that's awesome Well, because there is research in it, it's fun to think about Like just put it in your head and just think about it for a little while

But out there, in 1994 they actually discovered strains of white pest that's actually immune to antibiotics So who knows when that's gonna come out, I don't know when that's gonna really be unleashed I just can't believe Domino's brought the noid back That's what I'm upset about About a decade after the Great Mortality, the plague returned in a less lethal form Killing about 20% of the populations it infected instead of 50 This second plague, however, struck the young more than the old And came to be known as the children's plague

One more time, worse century to be alive God dang, but you also, you also think about the OG plague, the grandpa plague And then he looks at his generation, he looks at his great grandson plague And you're like, you're only killing 20% This is just so typical of the new plague generation Don't even understand how to kill 85% I was killing 85% and now you're killing 20% I am so sick of these pandemic zoomers

It is just unbelievable Get off your butt, plague, and stop playing plague video games and go kill people, please From there, the plague returned about once a decade throughout Europe for centuries afterward But with a much lower mortality rate of 10 to 15% But there was one notable exception See, just as the second plague pandemic started with the bang, so too did it dramatically end In 1665, 307 years after the Black Death first hit England The capital was hit with what came to be known as the Great Plague of London

In just 18 months, 100,000 people, a quarter of London's population, died of the bubonic plague In what was to be the last large outbreak of the second plague pandemic And it finally ended in the somewhat appropriate year of 1666 Get in the refineries! That's a really great time to end Wow, that's fun Mark of the beaver, man Mark of the beaver, Mark of the beaver

Wow But what was different here is that the plague was moving far slower Instead of jumping from city to city in a matter of days, weeks, or months This strain of the plague crept from neighborhood to neighborhood And instead of killing huge groups all at once, it stuck to clusters of people Like, for example, people who all slept in the same bed or wore the same clothes Or lived on the same lane This new kind of plague, the crawling plague, if you will, was also responsible for the third plague pandemic

Which began in 1855 and ended in 1960 Killing up to 15 million people in China and India over a period of 105 years It's still out there It's a spurious correlation, but look what happened in the 60s Everyone was smoking weed, man And the weed killed the plague, dude Dude, what? You know what's also interesting is I want to really look at...

There's a lot of studies that talk about the combination of earthquakes and plague How earthquakes would happen Like an Iceland earthquake happened, an England earthquake happened And then what it does is it rustles up all the rats Something happens, it creates a disturbance in their life And all of a sudden the rats are ready to go Don't piss off these frickin' rats, man They're skittish

You can just keep them happy and keep them away But the other difference is that while all those plagues were indeed horrible They were not the same plague that devastated Europe starting in 1348 There was no blood vomit, no malodorous smell And no gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs In other words, while the plague is indeed still terrible It isn't as bad as it used to be And isn't that nice

Isn't that nice? It's almost like God wanted to flip to more PG programming And he said, you know, it was really nice when we were in the attitude era But let's not have any more chair shots to the head Well, it shows that the viruses and bacteria Is these types of things that evolve to be less deadly so they can live longer Oh, well the best explanations we have for this is that the black death Or after the black death, Yersinia pestis either returned to being a rat disease Because it risked burning out its host population

Or it was a marmot strain that really did burn itself out by 1352 It just killed as many people as it could, reached the end of the road By the way, that reminds me, we have our new weed line Check out Embers here in LA, we actually have the marmot strain A marmot strain? Yeah, it's really good, it makes you feel like a beaver It's so good, it's contagious Ooh, it's so good

But even besides dealing with the plague for centuries afterward Europe was besieged by other diseases that killed almost as many In 1426, a flu epidemic killed 7% of the population And between 1485 and 1551, a mysterious disease called the English sweat Killed 10% of Europe It actually was a series of exercise tapes And they weren't ready for the exertion, it's so hard in England For them to get any cardio because of their Adam's apples

It presses against the windpipe Absolutely, sweating to the 1680s or whatever era we're in now And that's not even getting into outbreaks of smallpox Which smallpox is known as the red plague That's the Sammy Hagar of plagues Oh, that's cool And while smallpox ravaged Europe at rates that rivaled the Black Death at times It absolutely destroyed the indigenous people of North America once it crossed the ocean

And I think this is, we've said it before, but this bears repeating and this bears remembering Smallpox killed 90% of the indigenous population in North America It's an active biological warfare Also, Henry, did you want to make a joke? I just want to say, I mean like, you know, they got the blankets But think I wouldn't give them pillows Because then there goes the other 10% Jesus Christ

I'm just scared Wow, wow No, unbelievable though, that is so fascinating Yeah, anyone And we actually, the Europeans they came over, at first they didn't know And then once they figured it out, they definitely took advantage of it Yeah, that's as hard as this But like smallpox, flu, none of that stuff was in North America

Ollie knows when that show was going on, my people were in Poland Bearing people with their butts sticking out of the ground so they have a place to park their bikes That's what my people were doing Admittedly, my people were coming over here Admittedly, my people were coming over here and probably spreading smallpox and all kinds of shit My first ancestor was like 1600s, so like Wolf Trapper So yeah, definitely, definitely Guilty!

And come over, my folks didn't come here until 1960s Hey, they were chased here No, no, no, no Well in addition to all that, all those diseases, you also had dysentery all across Europe That was due to of course poor sanitation, because you get shit in your food sometimes You swallow shit, you're gonna get sick And that was responsible for the 50% mortality rate of infants In the Middle Ages

Oh my god, 50%, oh goodness 50%, but speaking of that mortality rate The Black Death had long lasting consequences on how long people lived, even after it was over See when things were solid in the 14th century An English boy in Essex could expect to live to the age of 54 pretty dependably Once he grew past the danger zone of childhood and entered puberty Once you get to puberty, you're all fucking good Yeah, because then you can't get picked up by a hawk

You can't fall into the shit river and drown I guess Richard the Raker did and he was a full grown man Absolutely, you can't fall in love with a turtle climbing its back And have it go into the water and then you drown You think that's the thing that happens? I wish I lived in your mind when every day's a fairy tale, Kessel I'm saying it's possible If you're a kid, you're like, that's a turtle and you cry and you climb on its back and it goes into the water

You're describing a dream you had when you were a child? No, I'm saying, I've been looking at a lot of turtle content lately The turtle was amazing, it lived in its own house You live in your house, we live in houses I know, but we move out of our houses Anyway, fascinating It is fascinating, the fake thing you said Turtles are fascinating, yes

But by the mid 15th century, that same boy who could have expected to live to 54 a century earlier He had lost 14% of his lifespan It could only expect to live to 48 years of age if he was lucky Because while society had held in many ways, it took centuries for Europe to fully recover from all of the cascading effects of the Black Death See, that boy is lucky, because man becomes perfect at 48 And then you're done, then you slowly slide into despondency and irrelevance Well, I think that would be horrible if you got dementia at 49 No, I'm just saying, that's just when people stop liking your shit on Instagram

Oh yes, that makes sense, that makes sense But even though life was fucking awful for almost everyone who lived through the Black Death It changed the way that Europe worked in fundamental ways that still echo into today's society By the end of the Black Death, the wealthy owner class and the labor class had switched places when it came to who held the power Because so many people had died, there were fewer people who could do work both skilled and unskilled And therefore, workers of all stripes could demand higher wages for the first time If you look at some of the way these aristocrats bitch from the 1350s about how hard it was to find laborers And then you look at comments made on certain news sites on our cable news about people not returning to work

They are exactly the same And to that I say, do you have two hands, Mr. Aristocrat? Do you have two feet, Mr. Aristocrat? Why don't you go to work? It is just complaining about how no one wants to work anymore because they're used to not working And paying someone to do work for them and they couldn't pay them enough And paying them very, very, very little The key is to make sure that you just barely pay them so that you can show them monetarily what they mean to you They're just essentially robot workers to you

I'm thinking these aristocrats got to bring back the noid It's too late, you were just bemoaning the return of the noid I don't know I'm telling you what they're doing, they're bringing back the noid Well at the same time, an overabundance of crops and livestock because everyone was fucking dead, no one was eating them That dropped food prices and that coupled with high labor cost hurt the lords and helped the peasants In addition to that, women gained new economic power because they were able to step into jobs that were traditionally male pre-plague They did it just as well as the male, as the mended

An interesting side quest for you is to look up the Chiampi revolt, C-I-O-M-P-I Which is the worker revolt that happened in Italy that was very interesting right after the plague Now King Edward very quickly tried passing laws in England to freeze wages at pre-plague levels And he also tried to make it illegal to refuse employment from a lord Does any of this sound fucking familiar? It's wild I actually don't understand what you guys are talking about here Finally the people did take this job and shove it because they would go like, you come back here, sir

And you all do the hey, like you do, I don't know how you make it into those Swiss rolls The big lumps, you put it in the lumps right now, sir And they'd go, fuck you man And then just walk in the woods, cause they're just walking in the woods, you can't find them Yeah, but the workers, merchants and tradesmen who were for all intents and purposes the new middle class They held strong, they knew for the first time in their lives Possibly the first time in European history as far as they fucking knew They could demonstrably prove that the rich needed the workers more than the workers needed the rich

Hell yeah, that's a fact Because the power structures that kept the status quo had fallen apart just enough But also what is interesting about humankind is that they still managed to keep certain levels of order amongst themselves Like humans really understood at the time No, we actually can take care of us We don't need the church, we can create our own little fringe religions We can actually release ourselves from our own sins Cause they gave us permission to

The church when everybody was dying basically said, forgive yourselves if you would for a little while So they learned, we don't need them And at this point the middle class also started building their own churches for the first time Which was something that was reserved for lords Yeah, the chantry chapels Yeah And then humans never did anything wrong again Never again and it was fixed

We really nailed it Also this was the first time that artists could make a true living and become like merchants and artists became the middle class And so they could dress in the fineries of the aristocracy for the first time They were like we're silk and buttons Oh and you know artists, they deserve that Artists love that stuff But of course the establishment, once they started seeing all these people in the finest silk and buttons That were supposed to be reserved for the lords

They actually passed laws that banned peasants from owning silk, silver buckles, furline coats Anything that would allow the appearance of putting on airs You're gonna take my fucking drip? They would, absolutely they would Yeah, just wait for that, when they fucking, when they ban you from fucking wearing Jordans That's when I go to the capital Absolutely And of course all this shit partly led to the peasants revolt of 1381

But in the end the peasants gained enough ground where overt feudalism became a thing of the past And upward mobility was that much closer to being a reality for everyone Which where before was not a fucking option Furthermore workers demanding higher wages partly resulted in some of the most incredible advances in technology ever seen in human history And this is very interesting because it has some modern parallels with the arguments that people have against raising minimum wage See in the low wage days prior to the plague one could still make books at a reasonable price using several copyists who wrote each page by hand But after the plague those same copyists demanded higher wages And they were therefore too expensive to make bookmaking sustainable at least on a large scale

It became a much more tiny boutique thing But at the just the same time, Johann Gutenberg Oh, Gutenberg! He was perfecting the printing press in about 1350 And in the decades after the plague printed knowledge Available for the first time in human history Changed the world forever and ended up creating hundreds of new professions Just cut to him Gutenberg being like this is going to lead to the intelligence

It's going to rise in our society, people are going to learn more And then just cut to us 9-11, two years ago in Europe Looking at a newspaper that was talking about how a man found the biggest crisp That's where it looks to me Yeah, it just cuts to a fucking issue of hustler, the highest Oh, you can get some money, bro, stuff from hustler Don't be the great people of hustler cherry, however There's not one goddamn recipe in that magazine

I'm not demeaning a hustler, there's some great jokes in a hustler But I would say Johann Gutenberg might be a little shocked by all the piss play And very confused about the cartoons I didn't get Johann Gutenberg I didn't even have any other choice, all they did was just sex He's the great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather of Steve Gutenberg You just think that he wasn't covered in piss They were all covered

But it's insane, you know, like them demanding higher wages saying we deserve more Like it created innovation And that innovation created more, not just jobs It created professions, it created lives Like writers, like anyone could be a writer, it created journalists, it created publishers It created, oh, every fucking, so many things, it's insane You can just see the publishers, the publicists, the writer and the journalist All taking the guns out of their mouth right now as they listen to this

They just say, you know what, it is pretty good to be me, dad It is pretty good to be me, to be me To be me, it is good to be a publisher, man Me like big old book, not just for toilet paper anymore A book or learning page All you fucking screen printers out there that make your living screen printin' This is you, that's you, this is what you did, it's you It's you

Alright, I think my brain is officially plagued out Oh, my brain was not, no, I'm not me, man I'm messing with the plaguing to the earworm in my own brain I feel like the teacher of the great courses, the teacher that does the Black Death presentation for the great courses She comes from Purdue University, Dorsey Armstrong, she's an English professor And people are now, there was an article in the WAPO where people ask her like Or going to her for advice now, because this thing came out in 2016 And they're like, what do we do, you know all about plagues?

She's like, please stop coming to me for answers Well that's great, well it happened you said her full name here on the show So she'll be left alone forever Go get her No, absolutely not And finally, there was the way that the Black Death changed medicine Because the medical community came out of the plague with a reputation that was just as damaged as the churches But instead of doubling down on the bullshit like the church did and continues to do

The medical profession changed Instead of relying on pure deductive reasoning Which led to things like humorology and medical bleeding Physicians began to posit theories Against observable fact and analyze the results to see if they supported those theories And this of course is now known as the scientific method Great In addition to that, the concept of the hospital also evolved out of the great mortality

Before the plague, a hospital was simply a place to stuff sick people until they were covered Or much more likely, died But after the plague, hospitals became a place where physicians could actually try to cure the patient And even began separating people based on what was wrong with them Effectively creating the modern ward system Interesting So while the Black Death certainly made the 14th century the worst time in recorded history to be alive It could also be seen as the growing pains that essentially created modern society

Even if humans are still more or less the same basic animal that we've been for millennia Wow Alright, there it is We made it The Black Death, all five parts absolutely fantastic Hang on, look at the three of us Of the three of us Zero percent mortality rate for this podcast series

Zero percent, zero percent Well that was Because Travis is still alive Everyone's still alive and they must be We've made that a rule that's in the contrast Yeah, everyone has a life Well thank you all so much for listening to this series That was absolutely fascinating, great work

Learned so much, laughed a little along the way as well I love this shit We have so much more stuff coming up this summer We're really excited Next week we're going to be doing a creepy episode Something weird Something weird Something weird

We're gonna go old west Excited to go there The weird west Yep, we're going to, we're also gonna be You're gonna be afraid of the water again I'm kind of afraid of water already Yeah, you should be Yeah

But the most exciting thing of all Is just like the plague We're going back on tour Yeah! Mama Mia, here we go again Mama Mia, here we go again Another perfectly named tour And Marcus, do you want to tell our audience

A few of the places, and we do have some That we will be adding as well So this is not the complete, complete, complete list But it is the complete, complete list If you're just missing a few If your city isn't on this list, hold out hope You might be on the next release You never know when these three beavers

Are gonna run through town Causing you to be sick with laughter The only thing is, there is transportation at this point So when someone's like, you're in Des Moines I live in Des Monques And it's like 30 miles away It's like, just drive We're driving to you

We're starting on August 12th And we're going up until May 20th On these dates This is a big raft Go follow us at Instagram At LP on the left To find out exactly when we're gonna be coming To your city

Here we go St. Paul, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Omaha, Detroit Columbus, Cincinnati, Oklahoma City Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Oakland, Los Angeles Charlotte, Charleston, Durham, Charlottesville Marcus has probably been masturbated Got ya, got ya Norfolk, Baltimore

Coming back to Baltimore finally Portland, Eugene, Boise, Vancouver, Seattle Spokane, Birmingham, Alabama New Orleans, Austin, Dallas, Houston Richmond, Virginia, Washington, D.C. Philadelphia, Chicago, Jacksonville, Florida Atlanta, Memphis, Boston Mash and Tucket, Kentucky

Mash and Tucket, Connecticut Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Northfield, Ohio Toronto And finally, we're coming home To New York City New York City? Quick question though And this is to clarify for myself

And everyone who's been asking It's Vancouver, Washington, correct? No, it's Vancouver, but we're going to Canada We're going to British Columbia Yeah, we're going to British Columbia Okay, so just so everybody knows That's Vancouver, British Columbia Okay, because we probably shouldn't have put that on there

And we expect to have only a 40% mortality rate Throughout our tour That's what we're shooting for That's what we're shooting for We're going to have two large bonfires That you can walk through No beavers, unless they're attached to you ladies Wherever you are

You can hustle those in if you can You know what I mean? Well, all beavers are allowed No matter who they be attached to At the last podcast of the Left Live show We can't wait to see everybody on the road And then next week We also have a little announcement about a

We're working on a project with Spring Hill Jack Call Yeah, you're going to get into it It's going to make you shit I love that coffee It's a great diuretic But then after you shit You feel so light and fluffy And then you're also awake, isn't that nice?

Yeah, that is nice I love it And again, as I mentioned Embers, we are in Van Nuys Embers, E-M-B-E-R-Z That's a dispensary we're at right now If you want to get our vapes And Henry and I, July 24th

We'll be in Santa Ana And we will be hanging out At the dispensary there And then next Thursday on Shell Friday We're going to be in Cera dispensary Here in L.A. That's S-E-R-R-A That is on West 3rd Street in L.A.

So we're getting into L.A. And we're so excited And then it'll be next You said next Friday, that'll be? Next Friday Alright, well I'm going to go check that out there as well So I'll be, maybe I'll go hang around For five hours in the dispensary

They'll be so happy to see me there forever And they'll be like Did you know they brought the Noid back? Anyway, it's like we've heard Do any gas pumps work in this country Okay everyone, thank you all so much for listening Hope you're doing well out there Hail yourselves!

Hail Satan! Hail again Look who's today, Asians And just know, remember That you're going to die Because that's how you know to live a good life Do remember that an end comes Unless it's devastating to you

And you can't do anything Because you're paralyzed with fear Then just forget about it And it'll happen when it happens Yeah, that's kind of how I see it It'll happen when it happens It will, for certain Except to me, I'm invincible