The Rest Is History - 147. Disease, the New World and modern pandemics

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

How devastating were European arrivals to the Americas in terms of deaths and the introduction of new infectious diseases? Tom and Dominic are joined by Professor Kyle Harper from the University of Oklahoma to discuss the relationship between disease and colonial expansion, the origins of the Spanish flu and the spread of modern forms of infectious disease. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History and our second episode on the history of disease when we're joined by the University of Oklahoma's magisterial Professor Kyle Harper. So Kyle, if we can jump on a couple of centuries from where we were before but also kind of back to something you alluded to earlier the colombian exchange which is this absolute extraordinary moment in world history when you know columbus um arrives first of all in the caribbean then you have the arrival of the conquistadors in in mexico and peru the classic stories that you know tom you and i would have read as pure adventure stories when we were

growing up as as boys and there was virtually no mention of it at all i would have read as pure adventure stories when we were growing up as boys. And there was virtually no mention of it at all, I would have said, in the kind of children's histories of the subsequent kind of death toll. So what's the thinking now? Because you, I mean, obviously there is a colossal death toll, but it's not as cataclysmic as is often thought. And what are the diseases that the Europeans are bringing?

And also crucially i suppose you know obviously an exchange implies a two-way process so how is it that the the the indigenous americans as it were are dying in such large numbers but not the europeans or are the europeans dying and we just don't talk about it? Yeah, well, those are all great questions. And I'd say there was a tendency in the maybe 60s, 70s, 80s among scholars to exaggerate the population of the New World and to say there were 100, 120 million people in the Americas at the time of European arrival. That now seems, in general, probably implausible. The real number, we don't know, but it's probably closer to 40 million, give or take 10 million, than it is triple that number. The proposition that there were 100 and something million people in the Americas at the time of the New World sort of required that the arrival of, say, smallpox just sort of swept over the entire continent or both continents without before the Europeans could even get there in person in many cases.

And I think that version of the story has really suffered from a close look. But with that said, I still think that we can overdo that historiographical correction. So we can be too critical of that story and sort of forget that the biology matters. You say about, so we talked about the

conquistadors and cortez arriving in um the aztec empire the the demographic crash of mexico in the 16th century is one of the most extreme demographic events attested in history in 1516 there were perhaps 8 to 10 million inhabitants there by the end of the century there were two to three million but that might not just be because of disease though tom that might be because of the collapse of agriculture or disruption or war or all these or famine or all these other things, right? But it's clearly all of it. And it's only a question of in what proportion and through what mechanisms. I mean, there was a massive smallpox pandemic in 1520, 1521 that must kill a tragic number of people. There's another disease outbreak in the 1540s

that is extremely well attested in the evidentiary record. We don't totally know what it was, and it may have been multiple diseases. This is also one really cool area where the ancient DNA, there was a team that sequenced the DNA of the pathogen that killed a victim, several victims from skeletons at a site in South Central Mexico in the 1540s. And what they found was paratyphoid fever. So it wasn't smallpox, which doesn't mean smallpox wasn't there. It wasn't typhus, which doesn't mean typhus wasn't there. But what they did find in a number of these mass burial skeletal remains was a bacterial pathogen that is transmitted via the fecal-oral route. So a disease that is transmitted in waste that would have been introduced from Europe, from the old world. And this is a really interesting find, unexpected find.

And it does remind us that it wasn't just these big notorious diseases like smallpox, but it's the total biological change, the introduction of a large number of pathogens that would have been unfamiliar in the new world. So that's a really good example. But 1540s, then again, a generation later, and then again, about a decade later. So there's these four really big pandemics that strike one of the most densely settled corridors of the new world in central Mexico, and really did have cumulatively a major, major demographic effect. that apparently it was in the New World before Columbus arrived there. So it originates in East Africa. It spreads. And seals seem to have caught it.

And they seem to have swum across the Atlantic and then been butchered and eaten. And this is the crazy story that seems to be the way that the dots are connected as far as we know now. And it may change as archaeogeneticists get more DNA, but tuberculosis is, we can talk about it, is one of the great human diseases by any measure.

It's a chronic respiratory disease. It's a very strange disease and it causes a huge burden of morbidity and mortality. One of the big mysteries was that tuberculosis, the people who work on skeletons, archaeologists who work on New World skeletons, really believed that tuberculosis was there. And one of the things about tuberculosis, because it's a chronic disease, it can leave a mark on the skeleton. Most of these acute infectious diseases, so like plague or smallpox, they kill you so quickly, they don't leave evidence in your skeleton. But chronic infectious diseases like

leprosy, tuberculosis, syphilis can produce very diagnostic stresses in skeletal remains. And so the people who worked on the neural burns were saying tuberculosis was here. And if you were looking at the record, the historical record, there were various reasons to think that that was maybe not the case. Certainly when we started getting genetics, all of the new world tuberculosis today is descended from European tuberculosis. So this caused a real dissonance. And the way it seems to be resolved at the moment is that there was, so there was tuberculosis here before Columbus, the DNA has been found. What's interesting about the lineage of the DNA of tuberculosis in the new world prior to European arrival is that it seems to be very closely related to and descended from a branch of the bacterial family tree that is commonly found in

sea mammals. So this suggests the possibility that this ultimately human disease is going from humans into other animals. So tuberculosis is a human disease as we know it, but it also infects other animals. And it's possible that humans, either directly or through some other intermediate animals, gave it to sea mammals who have helped disperse it to places across oceans even before humans could move. So it's a pretty wild story that the puzzle pieces certainly can be fit together that way. And it has resolved this big problem that there's tuberculosis in the new world before Columbus, you can see it in the bones. But when European tuberculosis arrives, it sort of outcompetes the local strains that don't exist anymore. Can I ask a question? We had questions sent in by our listeners. Tom and I frequently

fail to ask any of the questions that the listeners have sent in by our listeners we haven't we've tom and i frequently i fail to ask any of the the questions that the listeners have sent in so we should ask them in fairness so we should ask while you're very kind so um a couple of them sent in questions about divine punishment so um joshua terry sw jacobs they both said at what point do people stop seeing diseases divine punishment so with the black death is a is a great example isn't it because there were lots of people at the time who said we have been punished for our sins by god and obviously over time that dwindles but at what point do you think i mean early modern what's the point or or or later you know 18th century

victorian what's the point in which people stop looking, as it were, to the heavens for the causes? Yeah, well, I mean, and obviously, it never completely stops, right? Think of some of the responses to AIDS or even COVID-19. So it doesn't completely stop, but the point of the question is a good one. And the way I would get to the real answer, I think, is the 18th century. And I think there's a really

seminal moment in the culture of science, and that includes medical science, where, of course, there's rational medical science going back to antiquity. And yet, in the 18th century, there becomes a much more pervasive, one, empirical mindset. So it's sort of part of the triumph of, of, of let's not trust dogma, whether that's religious dogma or received, you know, Hippocratic, Galenic medicine, we have to test everything. And look at, look at, you know, one of, I think the great accomplishments of the human mind is Edward Jenner's 1798 publication of the discovery of vaccination. It is a perfect reflection of 18th century empiricism in that it's very undogmatic. I mean, he doesn't really have a theory of why vaccination works. He sort of

is interested in connections between animal and human health and disease, obviously. But it's a series of case studies. I mean, you know, his proposition, his hypothesis about vaccination is only going to stand or fall on the empirical record. It's a really cool, it's an amazing accomplishment, but it's to me a kind of symbol of the empirical mindset. But also combined with that is a kind of optimism that infectious disease can be prevented. And they don't think of it as infectious disease even, just that a large number of human diseases, before they even understand germs, microbiology really is

the key to understanding the mechanisms of disease. There's a sense that human societies and human individuals can do things. They can wash their clothes. They can avoid really closed indoor environments where the air is congested and dirty. They don't understand that tuberculosis is spread in tiny little droplets that carry the bacterium from one person to the next. But if you say we can prevent disease by making sure that there's good ventilation and access to clean water and that we're draining swamps so that they have the mechanism totally wrong of what causes malaria or what they call the ague. But if they say we can stop it by draining this swamp, they don't know that it's killing the mosquitoes that are transmitting the disease, but it works. So on the topic of insects and transmission, you have, I thought, a completely devastating chapter, basically, on the impact that the slave trade has on the spread of diseases from this kind of great sink of disease in West Africa to the tropics in the new world. And you describe Ailes aegypti, mosquito, as the most dangerous animal in the world because it takes yellow fever to the character Jamaica, to Barbados, islands that had been covered in jungle that have then been felled, sugarcane planted. And what this insect needs is sugar, human bodies, and stationary water.

And on the slave plantations, you have all three. Obviously, we think of slavery as a plague, but I had not realized that it kind of literally serves to incubate plague as well and disease. And is this something that is widely appreciated because i had i had i hadn't appreciated at all i read your chapter well i thank you i i think it's so important and i think it has been too often missing from big histories of disease for whatever reason now there's there's some very good work. And in particular, I'm indebted to the work of John McNeill, whose book Mosquito Empires is an amazing contribution to

understanding these diseases. But for whatever reason, the histories as they've been written, they've been, I think, very Eurocentric and focused on what diseases Europeans are carrying, like smallpox or typhus, which we don't really know where that comes from. But there's been not nearly the same amount of interest or attention on the introduction of tropical diseases from the old world to the new world. And this has a huge effect on the kinds of societies that take shape in the Americas. And the kinds of societies that take shape in the Americas influence the diseases, how they move and how they fare in the Americas. So exactly as you were describing, the creation of a sugar plantation regime

creates the ecological context where- Because they're death traps, basically, aren't they? They're death traps, basically, aren't they? some of the, probably the worst sustained mortality rates in any sort of large scale context in human history. And so I think we have to reckon with what are the environmental dimensions of that? What are the specific diseases? And you mentioned yellow fever and malaria. Those are probably the two biggest ones, but there are others like hookworm and yaws that are also part of the story and kind of get left out sometimes. But that dimension of the whole Colombian exchange and making sure that it's not just what Europe brings to the Americas, but also is this triangular movement between Europe,

Africa, and the new world. Because that also affects the kind of societies that grow up in. So you meant to talk about West Africa, for example. Europeans don't settle in West Africa, obviously, because it's notoriously dangerous. I mean, you'll die of disease, you know, a posting to a West African kind of fort or something or a trading station can often be a death sentence, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it's certainly one of the factors for why there's not direct European colonization of West Africa. It's simply that the disease regime, first and foremost, the effect of malaria, falciparum malaria, the worst form of malaria, imposes such a heavy burden of mortality that

it's not even really a possibility until the 19th century with advances in medicine and weaponry at the same time. So the European mortality rates that are involved in the West African trade that we can sort of piece together are so astonishingly high. You just sort of wonder how did this even, how did they convince people to even be willing to take part in it? It was deceit, desperation, greed, but it's still just astonishing how deadly it was to encounter some of the environments of malaria that they were exposed to. We talked all about sugar. Is it a different story on cotton plantations in the American South? Is the mortality rate from disease lower there? Yeah. I mean, this is something I can only kind of superficially get into in the book because

trying to move across so much time and space, but it's clearly, when you're thinking about disease, you're always talking about the total ecological context. You know, what's being grown? What are the soils like? And there's a huge variety as you, even within the Caribbean, but as you move into the, say, the U.S. South, obviously the unhealthiest regions of the South are like the Mississippi Delta and the really deep South. New Orleans, probably one of the most unhealthy places in North America. It's really the only place where yellow fever can can basically be endemic um virtually all the time um and then there's a

huge difference again as you move into like the tidewater atlantic um and differences even between like south carolina um and the the mid-atlanticantic, where the plantation environments, the soils, crops, crop regimes, agricultural regimes, the social systems that those require, as well as the mosquitoes, what disease vectors and what diseases can exist are all interconnected. And the diseases are part of that story. But the line, and then even as you move further north, the Mason-Dixon line in the U.S. from really the south to the north along the Atlantic, which is sort of the transitional zone also where slavery moves from becoming a really absolutely dominant social institution to a kind of increasingly marginal one is also a really

important disease gradient in the in the ecology of disease and so you don't really have falciparum malaria above the the mid-atlantic ever in the in the united states whereas you do have it in say south carolina and that's a huge huge ingredient that's really important part of the story and if you look at the history of colonialism european colonialism and i guess specifically british colonialism um the the settler colonies whether it's new england in the 17th century or um australia or canada these are it's not a coincidence that these are areas that are essentially kind of immune to yellow fever and malaria and all the kind of diseases that otherwise would would prevent settler communities from establishing themselves yeah it is and it's

it's interesting to the the mentality um of of colonialism doesn't um doesn't really think in those terms. And, you know, one example of this is in the 1760s when it's obvious that the British are on the verge of defeating the French and preparing for treaty talks. There was a huge discussion in Britain about whether the Brits should demand Canada, like all of Canada or Guadalupe, you know, this tiny Caribbean island. And it was the fact that it was even sort of a major and, you know, intensely felt debate. Do you want what we would know, you know, just thinking of it in crass economic terms, a region of vast natural resources and hugely expansive land surface or a sugar island. And there are a lot of people who said we should demand this French sugar island because it was so valuable

in terms of the 18th century economy. Let's take a quick break here. We'll see you in a few minutes. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest is entertainment.com that's theentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. So going into the 19th century, this is when people start to,

certainly in Britain, and I guess in the United States as well, and in West European cities, there's massive projects to reform public health. There's a kind of understanding that basically living in your own shit isn't good, and that dumping it in rivers isn't good. But that is still, the assumption is still that there are kind of things like miasmas that drift around. And you say in your book that the concept of the miasma, the idea that germs kind of drift along on the air, it's wrong, but it's creatively wrong because it generates these campaigns to reform toxic cities. Yeah, exactly. I mean, miasma theory, the idea that sort of different kinds of environmental corruption or pollution in the atmosphere, putrefying matter, so it's something you can smell, is a source of disease. to be wrong because it doesn't really posit the existence of microbiological agents that infect the body.

But it may steer you towards doing some things that nevertheless work. And again, I mentioned, you know, Jenner doesn't even know how vaccination works. There's similar parallels in terms of some of the public health movements towards sewage and clean water. And in the context of the early 19th century, you have rapid industrialization, rapid urbanization, all of which is sort of, in some ways, setting back human health. Well, again, skeletons start to shrink, don't they?

They do, yeah. You see that it's a paradox. You see both very clearly in Western Europe and the United States. In the United States, it's called the Antebellum Paradox, that we know there's economic growth and urbanization and trade and manufacturers and finance are expanding, but also people are getting shorter. And the reason is because of the challenges of living in urban settlements. And one thing this does is it spurs the rise of a public health movement. So it kind of the sanitarian movement, the galvanization of a political force that starts to agitate. And this has a multi takes different shape in different societies as multiple facets. There's a social justice element to it that says, look, urbanization is making people very, very poor and desperate laborers. So there's really political dimensions to this.

But they're on the track of saying we have to clean up the cities. And is that turbocharged by the emergence of the new disease of cholera, which I hadn't realized. I mean, basically it emerges, you say, in August 1817, 50 miles from Calcutta, which seems very precise. Origination point. It's cholera is in some ways one of the most revealing diseases of the 19th century, particularly from a global perspective. And I think, first of all, you have to look at it from a global perspective. It's a major disease, still a major disease.

It's a terrifying disease when it's fecal-oral transmission. So you get it from poop getting into the digestive tract of the next victim, it causes very severe and rapid dehydration. So it can kill you within a day of infection, which is pretty extraordinary. And it really is a product of globalization. We now know that cholera isn't an ancient disease. It may have existed before 1817 um but not for for all that long um and and that really is the moment when it becomes a global disease it reaches calcutta it

reaches the the shipping networks of yeah because because it's next to calcutta which is the capital of british india and british exactly so then it goes out into the world and it goes out into the world again and again we see that and the first wave doesn't quite make it to Western Europe, but it's terrifying. But then in 1832, it does. It reaches Europe and the United States. And it's a disease that's interesting in that it doesn't actually kill anything like the number of people that plague or soon influenza will in Western Europe. But it really, it scares the heck out of society because it's at a time when there'd already been really important progress against

in controlling epidemic disease. So the really violent plagues, mortality shocks, mostly caused by Yersinia pestis had sort of been brought under control in Western Europe. Most people still died of infectious disease, but they died of tuberculosis and typhoid and sort of constant endemic diseases. And cholera was partly terrifying because it killed you so quickly and was so ghastly violent in its course.

But it was also terrifying because it was clearly causing these major epidemics at a time when Europe had just sort of started to get those under control, and it threatened to undo that. Just to ask on the impact that cholera has, it's also a disease of the poor, right? Because the poor are likelier to having filthy water. And so in a sense, that kind of amplifies social justice movements. It cuts across all kinds of political divides and issues, exactly. Let's talk about another globalized disease, if you like,

or another pandemic. So this is the one with which most listeners will, I guess, automatically be familiar because it's the one we've heard most about since the arrival of COVID-19, which is the so-called Spanish flu. So we know that the Spanish um was around in the great allied kind of troop camps at a tap there is some suggestion that it might have come from the american midwest and been brought by uh i mean i as far as i know the jury is kind of out on that but but maybe you know better but do you think there are well what are the what are the other

lessons we can learn from the spanish flu are there are there particularly resonant parallels between you know the 1918-19 situation and 2020-21 or or are they completely different do you think well like a good academic i'll say yes and no of course and the jury is out um i think it we don't really know that it came from the American Midwest. The better, more recent work suggests it was everywhere at once by the time we really see it. And we don't, it's a virus, it's a viral disease whose virus is normally endemic in bird populations. It's one of the kind of unusual, the most rare diseases are mammal diseases. This is a, this is a bird disease, which is kind of not totally unique, but it's, it's a little bit weird and influenza evolves in very different ways from COVID-19. So it has a segmented genome. It's kind of like a genome that exists in these eight mix and match parts. And this is like the H1N1 are describing the proteins for they're coded for by these different parts. And so the viral genome gets inside a host cell. And when it reassembles,

if there's two different viruses, two different strains in the same cell, the parts, the mix and match parts can get put together in a different fashion. So it evolves in this way that it can make it very elusive. So we still obviously are always trying to kind of predict and keep up with which strain of the flu is going to emerge this year. The history of flu is very interesting because the 1918 flu is not the first big flu pandemic in history. So this is a disease that must repeatedly have moved out of bird populations into humans and cause waves of respiratory disease. So there's one in the 1890s, isn't there? There's a big one in 1890 to 92, sometimes called the Russian flu. And so people have compared that to COVID.

Well, even more than that, some people have wondered, sit back a little bit here, there are, including COVID-19, there are seven coronaviruses that infect humans from this family, seven different species. Four of them before COVID-19 are already everywhere. We've all probably had a couple of them. They cause little common colds. We can estimate how old these viruses are. And an older paper about 15 years ago, using the viral genome, said that one of the main causes of the common cold in human this species of coronavirus emerged around 1890 and so this sometimes has caused people to wonder could the russian flu because we don't have the the dna or rna i should say of the

the russian flu um so we don't actually know what caused it. And so people have said, could this have been actually the emergence event of this now common cold coronavirus? I think it's a really interesting question. And we would like hard data in the form of the RNA of the virus from lung tissue of a victim, which surely exists in a museum collection somewhere. They got measles from like 1911 from a lung preserved in formaldehyde. So somebody somewhere should be able to just solve this question. But I think the Russian flu is probably flu.

In 1918 though, this influenza pandemic explodes. And it's true, it's a really extraordinary event. In some ways, it's the, it's the ultimate expression of a globalized world without yet jet travel. So it's still steamship and railroads that are, that are spreading it over long distances. But it is this, it's the ultimate pandemic in the age of fossil fuel transportation. And its global impact is enormous, 50 to 100 million dead. They didn't have the same therapeutics or clinical care that we have today. is that the 1918 flu disproportionately affects healthy people in their late childhood to early adulthood. And the demographic and social and economic impact of that is very different from COVID-19, but also just the moral political dimensions of this. So I think, I don't think

this is right, by the way, but I'm just saying it as a descriptive fact. I think if COVID-19 really, really made a lot of kids sick, that the whole moral political response to it would be different. I think parents would just say, screw it, you're all getting vaccinated and wearing masks, or you're not going to be in public ever again. So that takes us back to the passage that I read right at the beginning of our kind of tour de raison of history and disease, where you say that, I'll read it again, that dying of infectious disease had become anomalous, virtually scandalous in the developed world. That is clearly a part of the impact that COVID has had, isn't it? It is felt as a kind of scandal it's a it's a moral scandal that anyone should die of it uh but it's also a kind of scandal in in that this

shouldn't be happening to us we've it's a stage of history that we yeah it offends our sense of progress doesn't it you know we've moved on from there yeah exactly and that's one of the big differences in from the 1918 morally and politically that was a society even in places like britain and the united states where they still lived in a world where everyone alive you know was was more exposed to the burden of infectious disease and they remembered a very very recently receding world where it was just such a part of life whereas we've now had several generations where we just don't expect an infectious disease to cause a plague. I mean, a plague sounds like medieval. Don't these viruses know who we are?

So one of the things that people have actually said about COVID is that it's an effect of globalization. I mean, that's clearly the case that flights and everything. But clearly, one of the lessons of what you've been saying is that globalization has always been bad for health, that people moving around the world, it's right from the very beginning. But doesn't it go, isn't it bigger than globalization, Tom? Isn't it? I mean, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth now, Carl, so feel free to tell me I'm talking absolute rubbish. But isn't it that civilization? Well, that was the second.

The other lesson is that you basically you can't have a civilizational advance without a pathogenic advance as well. Yeah. And again, we may not want to hear this or believe this because we want simple narratives and we want to believe we can progress and succeed, but look at it like an ecologist. Remember that we're animals that have parasites that want to take advantage of our success. If there are more of us,

there are more cells to invade and to rob and to exploit and to hijack. And so look at it from an ecologist perspective and that contradiction, that paradox kind of dissolves. Anytime there is technology that lets us be more populous and more interconnected, it's going to change the zone of opportunity, the calculus for a pathogen and motivate them to try and take advantage of us in new ways. And so, yes, technological progress is good. It creates energy and alleviates poverty, suffering and early death. It also helps stir the evolution of new diseases. Globalization is good. It brings us the ideas and human diversity and of course the cuisine of the world. It's a great thing with

tremendous material and spiritual advantages and there's no going back. So we couldn't and we shouldn't undo globalization, but that doesn't change. And this is why I say we may not want to believe this, but the reality is that also exposes us to diseases in different ways. And so we just have to confront that from a realistic perspective rather than one that's kind of rooted in what we wish were the way the world works.

That seems the perfect point of which trend, doesn't it, Tom? Kyle, what an amazing sort of panoramic account your book is um thank you and thank you so much for coming on the podcast and taking us through it i mean it's actually quite a depressing story in a way but i suppose it's it's good to well it doesn't need to be depressing does it because it's just facing up to our own humanity and our place in the world well they also i mean you know you you read plagues upon the earth disease in the course of human history um you read it and you feel even with what we've gone through the past two years how lucky we are to be like i mean it's like it's like that people always say dentistry don't they when they say you know what period of life would

you what period of history would you like to live in people are the present because of dentistry but you definitely you know you read your book and you think we we we are lucky to be born when we are and i can't emphasize enough um that this is a brilliant work of history but it's also stylistically brilliant it's wonderfully well written thank you and indeed um the incredible book that you wrote on slavery and on um christian sex morality in late antiquity very different fields. So Tom definitely has your picture by his side. Well, it's mutual. Well, do you know, I mean, I think your books on late antiquity, I think you're the heir of Peter Brown,

and there is no higher praise that can be given. There is none, but that's too kind. Thank you all. This was a lot of fun. I'm very touched by your kind words and and thoughtful readership of the book and um it is a little a little depressing but there are some there's some optimistic and hopeful elements too so um we can we'll we'll pull through this eventually it hasn't been pretty and it won't be but um but i'm an optimist in the long run okay thanks so much

thank you all thanks so much for listening um We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.