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Speaker 1: Imagine stepping out your front door to head to work,

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just a normal Tuesday, right, but instead of your usual commute,

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you're met with a twenty five foot wave of boiling

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black molasses just rushing at you at thirty five miles.

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Speaker 2: Per hour, which is an absolutely terrifying visual, it really is.

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Speaker 1: Or imagine you look down the street and see your

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neighbors dancing in this silent, agonizing trance. Their feet are

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bleeding and they physically cannot stop.

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Speaker 2: It sounds like the opening scene of a surrealist horror

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film honestly, or some post apocalyptic fiction exactly. But the

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truly terrifying thing is that these are the visceral, chaotic

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realities of our own past.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads Today. We've pulled together a massive

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stack of sources just for you.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we've been digging through some really dark stuff.

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Speaker 1: We are talking declassified intelligence memos, historical medical logs, municipal records,

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and these forgotten journalistic accounts. We are peering into.

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Speaker 2: The vault, as of forgotten because usually when we study

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the past, we're handed this neat linear.

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Speaker 1: Progression, right, like a highlight.

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Speaker 2: Reel, exactly, a highlight reel of treaties, innovations, and heroic triumphs.

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Speaker 1: But if you dig just beneath the surface of our

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so called civilized past, you find a trail of events

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so bizarre and honestly so cruel that they have been

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deliberately scrubbed from the modern curriculum.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and we are talking about the traditional tragedies of

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war today.

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Speaker 1: No, we are looking at the moments where the systems

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we trust simply broke down or worse, functioned exactly as intended,

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but with terrifying results.

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Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that the value of looking at

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these scrubbed events is that they offer a pure, unvarnished

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look at human nature under extreme stress.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: When you examine these historical anomalies, whether it's an environmental

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oversight or a bizarre medical betrayal, you strip away the

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polite veneer.

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Speaker 1: Of society you really do.

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Speaker 2: You get to see the raw mechanics of mass psychology,

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the incredible danger of institutional hubris, and well the sheer

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fragility of our societal norms.

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Speaker 1: It forces you to look at the structures you rely

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on every day and realize just how thin the walls

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protecting you actually are. And that is exactly the immersive

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journey we are taking you on today. By the end

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of this deep dive into these sources, you're going to

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view the very concept of progress through a much sharper,

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far more critical lens.

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Speaker 2: Because the monsters of the past didn't always hide in.

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Speaker 1: The dark, No, they didn't. Sometimes they operated in broad daylight,

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right in the middle of town squares.

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Speaker 2: Which is a perfect segue.

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Speaker 1: Actually, right, speaking of town squares, let's start by looking

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at what happens when the human mind itself becomes the

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vector for a disaster.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we usually think of a catastrophe as something external,

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like a storm or an earthquake.

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Speaker 1: But what happens when the chaos is generated from within

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our own brains. Let's travel back to July fifteen eighteen

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to the streets of Strasbourg.

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Speaker 2: This is one of the most haunting psychological events on record.

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Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this picture the scene. It's the middle

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of summer. A woman named Frau Trofe steps out of

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her house and into the narrow dirt.

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Speaker 2: Streets and she just begins to dance.

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Speaker 1: Right, And I have to be clear here for everyone listening,

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this isn't a joyous jig. There is no music.

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Speaker 2: Playing, none at all.

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Speaker 1: She dances relentlessly without stopping for six entire days.

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Speaker 2: Which physiologically is almost impossible to comprehend.

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Speaker 1: And the terrifying part is that it spreads within a month,

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four hundred people of jointer in the streets.

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Speaker 2: Four hundred people.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's not a festival. It is a silent

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rhythmic trance. Witnesses at the time describe people screaming for

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help as their feet literally bled and their muscles tore, yes,

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but their bodies just kept moving.

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Speaker 2: The physical toll of this is almost impossible to fully

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conceptualize unless you break down the mechanics of the human.

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Speaker 1: Body, because the pain would normally stop you.

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Speaker 2: Right exactly, we are talking about a state where the

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brain is completely disconnected from the body's natural pain signals.

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Right under normal circumstances, if you tear a muscle in

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your calf, or you know, the skin on the soles

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of your feet begins to slough off and bleed.

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Speaker 1: Ugh, just the thought of that.

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Speaker 2: I know it's brutal, but your central nervous system forces

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you to stop. The pain is a protective mechanism, right.

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Speaker 1: It's an evolutionary override to prevent catastrophic tissue damage.

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Speaker 2: But in Strasburg that mechanism was entirely short circuited.

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Speaker 1: Which means they were essentially trapped inside their own bodies.

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Speaker 2: Precisely, they were prisoners to a kinetic compulsion. Wow, they

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were entirely aware of their agony, actively screaming for intervention,

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but unable to halt the motor functions of their own limbs.

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Speaker 1: That is literal nightmare fuel.

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Speaker 2: It is. And because of this, dozens of people were

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dying every single day.

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Speaker 1: Wait, dozens of day.

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Speaker 2: Yes, their bodies simply gave out. They died from strokes,

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from massive heart attacks, and from pure absolute physiological exhaustion.

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Speaker 1: Now, if I'm standing there watching hundreds of people dancing

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themselves into cardiac arrest, my first thought is.

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Speaker 2: Restraint, right, tie them down.

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Speaker 1: Exactly, tie them down, get them water, sedate them somehow.

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But the response from the authorities is what really breaks

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my brain.

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Speaker 2: The historical response is definitely counterintuitive.

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Speaker 1: They look at this mass casualty event and decide, oh,

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they just need to get it out of their system.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the official medical consensus.

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Speaker 1: So they actually pay carpenters to build a massive wooden

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stage in the middle of the town market.

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Speaker 2: Not just a stage. They hired professional musicians too.

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Speaker 1: Right, pipers and drummers to play for them around the clock.

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That's like trying to cure a fever by throwing the

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patient into a sauna. It's torture disguised as medical intervention.

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Speaker 2: It seems like sheer madness to us, providing a soundtrack

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to a lethal event. But we have to understand the

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medical paradigm they were operating under. Okay, the logic in

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fifteen eighteen, the prevailing medical theory was based on the

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four humors blood, phlem, yellow bile, and black bile. Right,

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the physicians of the time believe that a disease was

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caused by an imbalance of these humors. Specifically, they thought

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the dancers suffered from quote.

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Speaker 1: Hot blood ah. So their logic was had to cool

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the blood down, They had to sweat it out exactly.

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Speaker 2: They applied the logic of a fever to a mass

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physiological crisis.

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Speaker 1: Unbelievable.

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Speaker 2: They believed that if they encouraged the dancing, the victims

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would eventually exhaust the hot blood and return to equilibrium.

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It was a prescribed medical intervention.

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Speaker 1: But it's an intervention that acts like gasoline on a fire.

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Precisely by building a stage and adding a rhythm, they

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likely drew more crowds, created a spectacle, and pushed those

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already exhausted bodies way past the breaking point.

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Speaker 2: It certainly made the contagion worse visually.

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Speaker 1: So what actually sparked this? Because four hundred people don't

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just simultaneously decide to dance to death based on a

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bad mood.

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Speaker 2: Modern pharmacology and historical meteorology give us a very compelling suspect. Actually, okay,

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ergot poisoning.

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Speaker 1: Ergot.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Ergot is a type of fungus that grows on

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damper and the weather records from the region leading up

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to the summer of fifteen eighteen show a period of

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intense rain followed by extreme heat.

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Speaker 1: Oh so like a greenhouse.

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Speaker 2: Effect exactly, the absolute perfect incubation conditions for this fundus

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to infect the local grain.

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Speaker 1: Supply, and rye was the staple grain for the lower classes.

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They were baking it into all their daily bread. Yes.

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Speaker 2: Now, the critical piece here is the chemistry of ergot.

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It contains alkaloids that are structurally incredibly similar to lysergic

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acid diaphylamide. Wait, LSD yes LSD. When ingested, it causes

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a condition historically known as san Antony's fire.

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Speaker 1: Okay, what does that do to a person?

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Speaker 2: It triggers severe vasoconstriction, meaning it cuts off blood flow

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to the extremities, which causes an intense burning sensation in.

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Speaker 1: The limbs, hence the fire part of the name, right, But.

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Speaker 2: More importantly for the dancing plague, it induces severe acute

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hallucinations and motor dysfunction.

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Speaker 1: Okay, let me see if I have this right, The

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burning sensation in their limbs could have triggered the initial

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frantic movement, like trying to shake the pain out.

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Speaker 2: That's a strong possibility, while.

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Speaker 1: The hallucinogenic properties of the tainted bread completely severed their

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grip on reality exactly so the entire town was essentially

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trapped in a mass involuntary, contaminated psychedelic trip.

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Speaker 2: That is the leading physiological theory. It was a massive

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accidental dosing of a medieval population.

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Speaker 1: That is just wild.

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Speaker 2: But what is truly terrifying is that while ergot might

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explain the initial spark, the way it spread, the sheer

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volume of people who were pulled into the vortex speaks

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to the mechanics of mass psychogenic illness.

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Speaker 1: Right, because not everyone probably eat the same bread.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, even if you didn't eat the tainted bread, Seeing

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hundreds of your neighbors caught in this terrifying, religious seeming

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ecstasy could trigger a psychosomatic response.

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Speaker 1: It takes something so deeply human and universally associated with

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joy dancing and twists it into a vehicle for agonized death.

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Speaker 2: It really does.

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Speaker 1: But let's pull on that thread of psychogenic illness because

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Strasburg is fascinating since we have a physical suspect in

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the irgout.

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Speaker 2: Fungus, right, the tainted grain.

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Speaker 1: But what happens when you remove the physical pathogen entirely?

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What if there is no tainted bread, But the exact

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same mass breakdown occurs.

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Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, that is

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where the fragility of the human mind truly exposes itself,

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when the behavior itself becomes the contagion.

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Speaker 1: Okay, let's jump forward nineteen sixty two. We are at

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a mission run girls boarding school in what is now Tanzania.

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Speaker 2: The tangan Yika laughter epidemic.

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Speaker 1: Yes, it starts with just three girls in a classroom.

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They begin to.

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Speaker 2: Laugh, but again, context is key here, right.

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Speaker 1: It's not a giggle over a shared joke. It's an intense,

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uncontrollable laughter.

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Speaker 2: It doesn't stop, and it spreads rapidly.

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Speaker 1: Within hours, this uncontrollable laughing fit spreads to ninety five

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of the one hundred and fifty nine students at the.

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Speaker 2: School, and we must clarify. Just like the dancing and straws,

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this laughter was devoid of actual amusement exactly.

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Speaker 1: These girls were in absolute agony. They were crying while

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they were laughing, which.

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Speaker 2: Is such a disturbing image.

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Speaker 1: They were lashing out, swinging their arms in pain because

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their diaphragms were literally seizing up.

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Speaker 2: Because your body isn't built to sustain that.

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Speaker 1: Right, Imagine the physical strain of laughing continuously without a

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break to breathe properly for hours. Some of these fits

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lasted for sixteen straight.

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Speaker 2: Days, sixteen days of laughter. The biomechanics of continuous laughter

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are incredibly destructive.

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Speaker 1: I can't even imagine my ribs heard after a good

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ten minute comedy set well.

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Speaker 2: It severely disrupts normal respiratory patterns. You enter a state

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of prolonged hyperventilation, which leads directly to oxygen deprivation, and

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that oxygen starvation is what caused the fainting spells, the

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severe skin rashes, and the temporary loss of motor control

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reported by the medical staff observing the victims.

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Speaker 1: So they were basically choking on their own laughter.

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Speaker 2: The body is essentially suffocated itself under the guise of

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an involuntary reflex.

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Speaker 1: The school authorities were so overwhelmed that they had to

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completely shut down the.

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Speaker 2: Facility, which you would think might help.

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Speaker 1: You would, But here's the terrifying part. Shutting down The

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school didn't quarantine the event, it mobilized it.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: The girls were sent home to their respective villages, and

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they took the laughter with them.

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Speaker 2: They infected their parents, their siblings, and neighboring towns.

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Speaker 1: Ultimately, over a thousand people were incapacitated by this contigious laughter.

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Speaker 2: Now, if we examine the environmental context, the mechanism of

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transmission becomes clearer.

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Speaker 1: Okay, what was the environment like?

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Speaker 2: This boarding school was known for its incredibly strict, rigid discipline,

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creating a very high stress environment for these young students.

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Speaker 1: Right, lots of pressure.

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Speaker 2: When you place a human mind under sustained immense psychological

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pressure and deny it any natural outlet for that stress,

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the brain will eventually force a physical release valve.

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Speaker 1: So one girl's brain essentially snaps under the pressure and

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initiates this laughing fit as a bizarre coping mechanism.

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Speaker 2: Exactly, well, why does the.

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Speaker 1: Girl next to her start laughing too? Like? How does

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it jump brains?

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Speaker 2: It comes down to mirror neurons and empathy weaponized by

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collective stress.

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Speaker 1: Weaponized empathy.

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Speaker 2: Wow, we are highly social creatures, hardwired to mirror the

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emotional states of those around us. It's why yon's are contagious,

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or why a baby cries when it hears another baby cry.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense.

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Speaker 2: So in a population that is uniformly stressed to the

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breaking point, seeing one person shatter the rigid social order

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with uncontrollable laughter acts as a psychological permission slip.

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Speaker 1: Oh wow.

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Speaker 2: The unconscious mind of the observer says, oh, the rules

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are broken, We're releasing the pressure now, and the body

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follows suit. The pathogen isn't a microbe. The pathogen is

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the observed behavior.

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Speaker 1: It's like a glitch in human programming where a smile

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becomes a weapon. It makes you look at laughter completely differently.

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Speaker 2: It truly does.

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Speaker 1: But while the human mind can create these invisible, uncontrollable

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disasters through mere suggestion, sometimes human industry creates very visible, terrifying,

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physical monsters out of the most mundane ingredients.

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Speaker 2: This is the intersection where the hubris of the industrial

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age violently collides with the unforgiving laws of physics.

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Speaker 1: Right, let's shift our focus from the mind to the

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physical world. Let's go to Boston January fifteenth, nineteen nineteen.

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A north end, yes, the north end of the city.

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Looming over the neighborhood is a massive steel tank belonging

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to the Purity Distilling Company. Inside this tank is two

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point three million gallons of molasses.

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Speaker 2: Two point three million.

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Speaker 1: Now, when we hear molasses disaster, it sounds almost comical.

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Speaker 2: That sounds absurd.

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Speaker 1: It sounds slow, like something out of a children's cartoon.

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You picture people leisurely out running a sluggish tide of syrup.

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Speaker 2: Which is a profound misconception of fluid dynamics. Conceptualizing that

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sheer volume of a highly viscous liquid requires us to

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think of it not as syrup, but as an immense

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battery of stored kinetic energy waiting for a structural failure.

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Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting and horrifying. The conditions

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leading up to that failure were a perfect storm.

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Speaker 2: They absolutely were.

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Speaker 1: The tank had been hurriedly constructed to outpace incoming prohibition laws.

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It was known to leak so badly that the company

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painted it brown to hide the molasses seeping through the

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steel seams.

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Speaker 2: They literally painted over the warning.

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Speaker 1: Signs exactly, And on this particular January week, Boston experienced

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a massive temperature swing from bitter cold to unseasonably warm.

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Speaker 2: That temperature fluctuation is the trigger. Molasses is a complex

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organic mixture. When the temperature rises, it accelerates the fomentation

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process of the sugars inside the tank.

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Speaker 1: Okay, and fermentation produces gas.

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Speaker 2: Yes, fermentation produces carbon dioxide gas. So you have sealed

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poorly constructed steel container completely full with an exponentially increasing

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internal gas pressure.

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Speaker 1: So it's basically a bomb.

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Speaker 2: It was quite literally a massive bomb.

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Speaker 1: When that tank let go, It didn't just leak. Witnesses

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described a sound that froze the blood in their veins.

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They called it a machine gun roar.

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Speaker 2: A rivets.

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Speaker 1: Yes, the massive steel rivets violently popped and shot through

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the air like shrapnel.

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Speaker 2: Incredible.

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Speaker 1: The steel walls of the tank ripped apart, releasing a

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twenty five foot high wave of boiling, sticky black goo.

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And it wasn't slow, not at all. This wave moved

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through the crowded city streets at thirty five miles per hour.

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Speaker 2: The physics of the wave are staggering and deeply horrifying.

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Molasses is what we call a non Newtonian fluid.

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Speaker 1: What does that mean in this context?

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Speaker 2: Well, because of its incredible density, it is roughly one

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point four times heavier than water. When it flows in mass,

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it behaves very differently than a water flood. A wave

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of water will hit an object and flow around it

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or push it aside, But a massive wave of a

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high viscosity non Newtonian fluid envelopes everything in its path

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under sheer stress. Like the violent force of the explosion,

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its viscosity actually changes.

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Speaker 1: Which means it essentially acted like a high speed.

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Speaker 2: Quicksand precisely it creates a vacuum effect.

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Speaker 1: That is the detail that truly haunts me. When the

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wave hit it leveled buildings, snapping heavy wooden girders like twigs.

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Speaker 2: It had the mass of a concrete wall. Moving at

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highway speeds.

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Speaker 1: It tipped over entirely loaded railroad cars, and for the

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people and the horses caught in its path, survival became

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a terrifying.

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Speaker 2: Paradox because of the quicksand effect.

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Speaker 1: Right the harder they struggled to swim or pull themselves

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out of the sticky mass, the more the non Newtonian

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fluid resisted, pulling them deeper into a literal sugary grave.

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Victims were found suffocated, completely encased in the hardened sludge.

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Speaker 2: It stands as a grim monument to unchecked industrial expansion.

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Speaker 1: It really does.

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Speaker 2: The municipal infrastructure simply allowed a company to build an

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inadequate container for an unimaginable force in the center of

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a densely populated residential area.

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Speaker 1: Just right next to people's houses.

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Speaker 2: Yes, we walk through our modern cities completely trusting that

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the towering structures of industry around us are fundamentally sound.

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Speaker 1: And we shouldn't always.

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Speaker 2: The Boston molasses disaster shatters that illusion. It turned a

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basic baking ingredient into an unstoppable lethal force purely through negligence.

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Speaker 1: The aftermath was a logistical nightmare. You can't just pump

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molasses into the sila.

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Speaker 2: No, it hardens, right.

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Speaker 1: Rescuers and cleanup crews had to spend weeks scraping this

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hardened syrup off the cobblestone streets, using high pressure streams

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of salt water to cut.

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Speaker 2: Through the sugar and dumping tons of sand to absorb

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the residue.

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Speaker 1: The harbor ran brown for months, And there's this chilling

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piece of local lore. Residents of the North End claimed

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that to this day, over a century later, when the

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summer sun beats down on the pavement, the faint, sickly

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sweet scent of the tragedy still rises from the brickwork.

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Speaker 2: It left a permanent sensory and architectural scar on the

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geography of Boston. Yeah, but what is truly staggering from

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a historical perspective is that this wasn't an isolated phenomenon.

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The blueprint for this exact type of industrial catastrophe had

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been drawn a century earlier lost the Atlantic.

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Speaker 1: Yes, let's travel back to eighteen fourteen to London, the

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Mew and Company.

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Speaker 2: Brewery, another disaster of mass storage.

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Speaker 1: Right now, they didn't have a steel tank, they had

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a massive wooden vat. This thing was an engineering marvel

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of the time, standing twenty two feet tall and bound

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by massive iron hoops. Inside was over one hundred and

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thirty five thousand gallons of fermenting.

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Speaker 2: Porter, a different liquid and a different era, but the

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exact same recipe for structural disaster. Immense volume, inadequate containment,

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and the invisible pressure of fermentation.

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Speaker 1: One of the massive iron hoops on the wooden vat

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simply snapped, just gave way, and the force of the

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sudden release was so immense that it not only destroyed

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the vat, it knocked down the brewery's solid brick walls.

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Speaker 2: Wow.

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Speaker 1: The collapse triggered a chain reaction, bursting several other huge

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vats in the facility. Suddenly, a tidal wave of dark

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fermenting beer swept through the narrow London streets.

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Speaker 2: Again, moving with the force of a tsunami.

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Speaker 1: It was so powerful it obliterated two houses entirely, and

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in a stroke of incredibly dark irony, it fled a

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basement where a family was holding awake for a young boy.

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It took the lives of the mourners. I want you

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to just imagine the sheer, surreal horror of standing it awake,

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grieving a loss and suddenly being engulfed and drowned by

400
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a tidal wave of beer.

401
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Speaker 2: The sheer absurdity of the cause masks the profound senseless

402
00:19:23,480 --> 00:19:27,240
tragedy of the result. Absolutely, But what happens after the

403
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initial wave subsides This raises an important question regarding human behavior.

404
00:19:32,440 --> 00:19:36,079
It takes a turn that is frankly, deeply disturbing.

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Speaker 1: I still struggle to wrap my head around this part

406
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of the historical record.

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Speaker 2: It's a tough one to process.

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Speaker 1: In the immediate aftermath of this destruction, while bodies were

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still trapped under the rubble of collapsed homes, hundreds of

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people flocked to the area from neighboring streets.

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Speaker 2: But they didn't come to help.

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Speaker 1: No, they didn't come to dig out the survivors. They

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came with pots, pans, kettles, and even their bare hands

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to scoop up the dirty, debris filled beer right out

415
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of the gutters so they could drink it.

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Speaker 2: This forces us to re examine a comforting myth we

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hold about human behavior in the wake of sudden disaster,

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which is wise well. We desperately want to believe that

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in times of crisis, communities instinctively banned together prioritizing rescue

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and the common good right look.

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Speaker 1: For the helpers, like mister Rogers said.

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00:20:19,400 --> 00:20:23,279
Speaker 2: Exactly, But the London beer flood reveals a much grimmer,

423
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opportunistic reality. The societal order didn't just bend, It collapsed

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instantaneously into pure chaos.

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Speaker 1: It was raw desperation and greed. People were getting violently

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drunk on filthy street beer amid the rubble of collapsed homes.

427
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They were literally fighting each other for access to the

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deepest puddles.

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Speaker 2: Of porter exactly, and the consequence of that opportunism compounded

430
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the disaster. The widespread consumption of this highly fermented, contaminated

431
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liquid led to rampant severe alcohol poisoning across the district.

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Speaker 1: Oh my god.

433
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Speaker 2: It turned a brief, violent structural accident into a prolonged

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behavi avil nightmare that lasted for a week.

435
00:21:02,039 --> 00:21:02,319
Speaker 1: Wow.

436
00:21:02,519 --> 00:21:05,079
Speaker 2: The disaster wasn't just the flood of liquid. It was

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the mass to sent into madness that followed it, facilitated

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by the complete abandonment of empathy.

439
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Speaker 1: It's astonishing, but as explosive and impossible to hide as

440
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these giant waves of molasses and beer were. Human industry

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was learning, learning how to hide it right. Governments and

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00:21:22,240 --> 00:21:25,759
corporations soon learn that you don't need a massive structural

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failure to cause a catastrophe. You can mask lethal mistakes

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00:21:29,240 --> 00:21:32,200
over time. You can hide them in plain sight, in

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the very air we breathe.

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Speaker 2: This marks a critical shift in our journey. We are

447
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moving from sudden, localized structural failures to a pervasive, slow

448
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moving environmental terror that enveloped an entire capital city.

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Speaker 1: We're looking at the great smog of London in December

450
00:21:49,880 --> 00:21:52,880
nineteen fifty two. Yes, now, I want you to try

451
00:21:52,960 --> 00:21:57,240
and conjure the most claustrophobic atmosphere possible. Imagine sitting inside

452
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a large movie theater and suddenly a thick, yellow, black

453
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fog rolls into the room, indoors indoors. It's so dense

454
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that you literally cannot see the screen in front of you.

455
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You hold your hand up to your face and your

456
00:22:08,720 --> 00:22:11,000
fingers disappear into the gloom. It's like living inside a

457
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chimney that has been capped off.

458
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Speaker 2: That analogy of the capped chimney is meteorologically perfect. Yes,

459
00:22:17,480 --> 00:22:20,400
what happened in nineteen fifty two was a fatal convergence

460
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of economics, weather, and unchecked industrial pollution. We have to

461
00:22:25,079 --> 00:22:28,119
look at the post WWII context.

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Speaker 1: Okay, So Britain in the early fifties.

463
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Speaker 2: Britain was economically devastated. To pay off war debts, the

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government was ex supporting all of its high quality, clean

465
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burning coal.

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Speaker 1: Okay.

467
00:22:38,759 --> 00:22:41,200
Speaker 2: What was left for the domestic population to burn in

468
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their home fireplaces was a cheap, low grade coal known

469
00:22:44,960 --> 00:22:46,920
colloquially as nutty.

470
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Speaker 1: Slack nutty slack, and this nutty slack was infamous for

471
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being incredibly high in sulfur content.

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Speaker 2: Precisely so, in December nineteen fifty two, a period of

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extreme cold weather sets in the population quite naturally, trying

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00:22:59,599 --> 00:23:02,480
to avoid freezing to death, burns massive quantities of this

475
00:23:02,559 --> 00:23:06,759
high sulfur coal. Simultaneously, an anti cyclone, a massive high

476
00:23:06,799 --> 00:23:10,519
pressure weather system, stalls directly over London. This creates a

477
00:23:10,559 --> 00:23:13,960
temperature inversion. It acts as an atmospheric lid, trapping all

478
00:23:14,079 --> 00:23:17,160
the cold, stagnant air at ground level, along with millions

479
00:23:17,160 --> 00:23:18,480
of tons of airborne pollutants.

480
00:23:18,519 --> 00:23:21,880
Speaker 1: And so for five entire days, the city of London

481
00:23:21,960 --> 00:23:24,359
was plunged into pitch blackness in the middle of the day,

482
00:23:24,440 --> 00:23:26,440
total darkness. But I want to make it very clear

483
00:23:26,440 --> 00:23:29,079
to you. This wasn't just a thick fog. It wasn't

484
00:23:29,400 --> 00:23:35,000
merely difficult to navigate. It was a lethal, highly acidic

485
00:23:35,519 --> 00:23:36,359
chemical soup.

486
00:23:36,480 --> 00:23:39,000
Speaker 2: The chemistry of the smog is what elevated it from

487
00:23:39,119 --> 00:23:41,240
a nuisance to a mass casualty event.

488
00:23:41,319 --> 00:23:41,960
Speaker 1: How bad was it?

489
00:23:42,400 --> 00:23:45,640
Speaker 2: The thousands of tons of sulfur dioxide pumped out by

490
00:23:45,640 --> 00:23:48,759
the chimneys mixed with the heavy moisture and the stagnant

491
00:23:48,799 --> 00:23:52,240
air to form highly concentrated sulfuric.

492
00:23:51,720 --> 00:23:56,519
Speaker 1: Acids sulfuric acid. People were breathing aerosolized acid. Yes, it

493
00:23:56,599 --> 00:24:00,079
was so corrosive that it was literally eating through the

494
00:24:00,119 --> 00:24:03,680
other soles of people's shoes as they walked down the pavement.

495
00:24:03,839 --> 00:24:04,599
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.

496
00:24:04,680 --> 00:24:07,440
Speaker 1: Witnesses reported seeing birds drop dead out of the sky

497
00:24:07,559 --> 00:24:11,079
mid flight, their tiny respiratory systems instantly burned away.

498
00:24:11,319 --> 00:24:12,640
Speaker 2: Environment was just toxic.

499
00:24:12,920 --> 00:24:16,480
Speaker 1: The visibility was reduced to less than twelve inches. People

500
00:24:16,519 --> 00:24:18,680
were trying to walk home completely lost in their own

501
00:24:18,680 --> 00:24:21,160
neighborhoods and were walking right off the edge of the

502
00:24:21,160 --> 00:24:23,519
docks and drowning in the River Thames because they couldn't

503
00:24:23,519 --> 00:24:25,799
see the ground in front of their own feet. Public

504
00:24:25,839 --> 00:24:31,160
transport completely ceased, Ambulances stopped running, theaters had to close

505
00:24:31,200 --> 00:24:34,279
mid performance because the smog was seeping indoors and filling

506
00:24:34,279 --> 00:24:35,119
the auditoriums.

507
00:24:35,359 --> 00:24:39,200
Speaker 2: The urban environment constructed to sustain and protect millions of

508
00:24:39,240 --> 00:24:43,160
people had become fundamentally incompatible with human life, and.

509
00:24:43,079 --> 00:24:46,000
Speaker 1: The toll was catastrophic. By the time the wind finally

510
00:24:46,039 --> 00:24:48,920
shifted after five days and blew the toxic lid away,

511
00:24:49,359 --> 00:24:52,880
over twelve thousand people were dead. Twelve thousands, the vast

512
00:24:52,920 --> 00:24:56,119
majority of them were the most vulnerable among us infants,

513
00:24:56,240 --> 00:24:59,559
young children, and the elderly. They essentially drowned in their

514
00:24:59,559 --> 00:25:01,680
own beds from respiratory.

515
00:25:01,079 --> 00:25:03,680
Speaker 2: Failure, a completely preventable tragedy.

516
00:25:03,759 --> 00:25:05,880
Speaker 1: But here is the part that elevates this from a

517
00:25:05,920 --> 00:25:09,599
tragedy to an absolute outrage. The government cover up.

518
00:25:09,759 --> 00:25:13,839
Speaker 2: Yes, the governmental response is where an environmental disaster transforms

519
00:25:13,839 --> 00:25:16,039
into a profound institutional betrayal.

520
00:25:16,079 --> 00:25:19,279
Speaker 1: The British government initially tried to blame the staggering spike

521
00:25:19,319 --> 00:25:24,000
and mortality on a sudden, mysterious flu outbreak. A flu outbreak, right,

522
00:25:24,119 --> 00:25:26,039
let me see if I have this political calculus right.

523
00:25:27,079 --> 00:25:31,079
They fabricated a viral epidemic to protect the economic interests

524
00:25:31,079 --> 00:25:33,880
of the coal industry and to hide the true scale

525
00:25:33,880 --> 00:25:35,400
of their own environmental oversight.

526
00:25:35,519 --> 00:25:36,160
Speaker 2: You've got it.

527
00:25:36,119 --> 00:25:40,039
Speaker 1: Because admitting the smog killed them meant admitting the government's

528
00:25:40,079 --> 00:25:43,599
economic policy of pushing nutty slack was a death sentence.

529
00:25:43,880 --> 00:25:46,960
Speaker 2: Your deduction is entirely correct. The anti cyclone was an

530
00:25:46,960 --> 00:25:50,119
act of nature. You cannot legislate the weather, right, but

531
00:25:50,240 --> 00:25:54,599
the prioritization of an industry, specifically coal exports, over the

532
00:25:54,680 --> 00:25:59,720
lungs of twelve thousand human lives was a calculated human decision.

533
00:25:59,720 --> 00:26:04,039
It marks one of the worst environmental betrayals in modern history.

534
00:26:04,440 --> 00:26:08,440
The government possessed the meteorological data, they understood the extreme

535
00:26:08,519 --> 00:26:11,119
toxicity of the coal being burned, and yet they chose

536
00:26:11,200 --> 00:26:15,240
economic output over public safety. And then they attempted to

537
00:26:15,319 --> 00:26:18,519
gaslight an entire grieving metropolis by pointing the finger out

538
00:26:18,519 --> 00:26:19,720
of phantom flu virus.

539
00:26:19,759 --> 00:26:23,640
Speaker 1: The audacity of looking at twelve thousand suffocated citizens and

540
00:26:23,799 --> 00:26:26,440
lying to the survivors about the very air they were

541
00:26:26,519 --> 00:26:27,920
breathing is staggering.

542
00:26:28,039 --> 00:26:29,160
Speaker 2: It really sits a precedent.

543
00:26:29,519 --> 00:26:33,079
Speaker 1: It perfectly links the government's willingness to lie about the

544
00:26:33,119 --> 00:26:37,440
air to an even darker reality. Because if an administration

545
00:26:37,599 --> 00:26:40,519
is willing to let you choke on toxic smog to

546
00:26:40,599 --> 00:26:44,440
protect an industry. What happens when they decide national securities

547
00:26:44,480 --> 00:26:45,319
on the line.

548
00:26:45,440 --> 00:26:48,000
Speaker 2: The transition from the mid century into the Cold War

549
00:26:48,079 --> 00:26:51,640
era ushered in a terrifying new ethical paradigm. To put

550
00:26:51,680 --> 00:26:54,839
it mildly, the boundaries that were supposed to protect civilian

551
00:26:54,880 --> 00:26:58,880
populations from military aggression were routinely dismantled by the very

552
00:26:58,920 --> 00:27:00,400
states sworn to part them.

553
00:27:00,519 --> 00:27:03,680
Speaker 1: We were talking about governments intentionally turning their own citizens

554
00:27:03,920 --> 00:27:07,279
into unwitting test subjects. Yes, let's look at the UK again,

555
00:27:07,319 --> 00:27:09,680
this time in nineteen forty five, right at the infancy

556
00:27:09,720 --> 00:27:13,279
of the Cold War, the UK Ministry of Defense decided

557
00:27:13,279 --> 00:27:15,720
they needed to know exactly how a biological attack would

558
00:27:15,720 --> 00:27:17,519
spread across the British countryside.

559
00:27:17,599 --> 00:27:18,920
Speaker 2: So they ran an experiment.

560
00:27:19,119 --> 00:27:22,440
Speaker 1: So they conducted secret germ warfare trials. They loaded up

561
00:27:22,440 --> 00:27:25,319
a specialized truck with sprayers, drove it through the quiet

562
00:27:25,359 --> 00:27:29,799
towns of Derbyshire, and released massive clouds of bacteria directly

563
00:27:29,839 --> 00:27:31,000
over the general population.

564
00:27:31,400 --> 00:27:33,960
Speaker 2: Now, to understand the mechanics of this operation, we have

565
00:27:34,039 --> 00:27:37,759
to look at the historical record. The military scientists believed

566
00:27:37,880 --> 00:27:40,720
at the time that the specific strain of bacteria they

567
00:27:40,720 --> 00:27:45,640
were aerosolizing was harmless to humans. But right they viewed

568
00:27:45,640 --> 00:27:48,559
it merely as a fluorescent tracer, a way to map

569
00:27:48,640 --> 00:27:53,119
the wind currents and dispersal patterns of a hypothetical Soviet bioweapon.

570
00:27:53,279 --> 00:27:57,880
Speaker 1: But they were wrong. It wasn't a harmless tracer. Shortly

571
00:27:57,920 --> 00:28:01,200
after the truck rolled through, thousands of people in Derbyshire

572
00:28:01,240 --> 00:28:05,599
developed crippling pneumonia and severe internal infections.

573
00:28:05,079 --> 00:28:06,599
Speaker 2: A direct result of the spring.

574
00:28:06,920 --> 00:28:10,759
Speaker 1: And here is where the betrayal cuts the deepest. Because

575
00:28:10,839 --> 00:28:14,359
this entire germ warfare project was classified under the highest

576
00:28:14,440 --> 00:28:18,039
levels of top secret clearance, the local doctors treating these

577
00:28:18,119 --> 00:28:20,000
dying people were completely in the dark.

578
00:28:20,279 --> 00:28:23,279
Speaker 2: This is the crux of the horror. The secrecy surrounding

579
00:28:23,319 --> 00:28:26,240
the operation actively compounded the physical harm.

580
00:28:26,400 --> 00:28:29,200
Speaker 1: Right, the doctors are looking at their patients, trying to

581
00:28:29,240 --> 00:28:32,440
figure out why they are suddenly succumbing to this mysterious,

582
00:28:32,680 --> 00:28:36,400
highly resistant infection that wouldn't respond to any standard medicine.

583
00:28:36,400 --> 00:28:38,119
Speaker 2: Because they didn't know the origin.

584
00:28:38,119 --> 00:28:41,720
Speaker 1: They are fighting an invisible enemy with one hand tied

585
00:28:41,759 --> 00:28:44,720
behind their backs by their own government, unable to request

586
00:28:44,759 --> 00:28:47,960
the specific antibiotics that might have saved lives because they

587
00:28:47,960 --> 00:28:49,160
didn't know what they were fighting.

588
00:28:49,359 --> 00:28:52,200
Speaker 2: What is deeply grim about the ethical void of the

589
00:28:52,240 --> 00:28:56,519
early Cold War era is the terrifying disconnect between abstract

590
00:28:56,599 --> 00:29:01,480
national security objectives like preparing for a hypothetic biological apocalypse

591
00:29:02,119 --> 00:29:06,119
and the immediate tangible value of a single civilian life.

592
00:29:06,240 --> 00:29:07,720
Speaker 1: Yeah, the math just doesn't work out.

593
00:29:07,880 --> 00:29:10,319
Speaker 2: The logic of the state dictated that the defense of

594
00:29:10,359 --> 00:29:15,039
the realm justified exposing its own citizens to unconsented, unmonitored

595
00:29:15,079 --> 00:29:19,000
biological risk. The individuals in Derbyshire were reduced to data

596
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:19,839
points on a map.

597
00:29:19,960 --> 00:29:23,200
Speaker 1: These families were grieving loved ones, burying their family members,

598
00:29:23,519 --> 00:29:26,079
completely unaware that they were being used as lab rats

599
00:29:26,119 --> 00:29:29,400
by the military they paid taxes to support exactly. But

600
00:29:29,440 --> 00:29:32,160
if we look across the Atlantic, the United States intelligence

601
00:29:32,200 --> 00:29:35,720
apparatus was playing a very similar, perhaps even more terrifying

602
00:29:35,759 --> 00:29:37,200
game with the minds of civilians.

603
00:29:37,519 --> 00:29:40,960
Speaker 2: Indeed, this brings us to an incident that bridges the

604
00:29:41,000 --> 00:29:45,200
gap between the mass psychogenic hysterio we discussed in Strasburg

605
00:29:45,599 --> 00:29:48,880
and deliberate state sponsored covert action.

606
00:29:49,680 --> 00:29:53,200
Speaker 1: Let's move to nineteen fifty one to a small, picturesque

607
00:29:53,279 --> 00:29:56,079
French village called Ponce aspris.

608
00:29:55,720 --> 00:29:57,920
Speaker 2: Also known as the cursed bread incident.

609
00:29:58,119 --> 00:30:01,519
Speaker 1: Yes la pimadite. The details of what happened over a

610
00:30:01,519 --> 00:30:03,640
few days in this village read straight out of a

611
00:30:03,640 --> 00:30:08,359
psychological thriller. Out of nowhere. This quiet community experience as

612
00:30:08,400 --> 00:30:12,240
a collective terrifying wave of extreme hallucinations.

613
00:30:12,319 --> 00:30:15,839
Speaker 2: It was a complete simultaneous fragmentation of reality across an

614
00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:16,880
entire population.

615
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:19,839
Speaker 1: It was pure chaos. One man tried to drown himself

616
00:30:19,880 --> 00:30:21,960
in the river because he genuinely believed his belly was

617
00:30:22,000 --> 00:30:23,079
being eaten by a nest.

618
00:30:22,880 --> 00:30:24,720
Speaker 2: Of vipers, a nest of fibers.

619
00:30:24,799 --> 00:30:27,640
Speaker 1: Eleven year old child attacked his own grandmother, attempting to

620
00:30:27,680 --> 00:30:28,960
strangle her with a heavy cord.

621
00:30:29,039 --> 00:30:29,880
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.

622
00:30:30,039 --> 00:30:32,440
Speaker 1: Another man jumped out of a second story window, shattering

623
00:30:32,480 --> 00:30:34,799
his legs, because he believed he was an airplane and

624
00:30:34,799 --> 00:30:36,559
could fly away from the monsters chasing it.

625
00:30:36,680 --> 00:30:37,880
Speaker 2: Total mass psychosis.

626
00:30:37,880 --> 00:30:40,200
Speaker 1: People were locked in the local asylum screaming that their

627
00:30:40,200 --> 00:30:42,440
bodies were shrinking or engulfed in flames.

628
00:30:42,720 --> 00:30:46,119
Speaker 2: Now the official narrative, the explanation pushed by the French

629
00:30:46,160 --> 00:30:50,519
authorities at the time, blamed this catastrophic breakdown on ergo

630
00:30:50,599 --> 00:30:54,880
poisoning from a local bakery urgot again. Yes, we discussed

631
00:30:55,000 --> 00:30:59,039
ergo earlier with the fifteen eighteen dancing plague. The authorities

632
00:30:59,039 --> 00:31:02,599
claimed the local baker had accidentally used contaminated rye flower

633
00:31:02,880 --> 00:31:05,279
and everyone who ate the morning bagette tripped.

634
00:31:05,839 --> 00:31:07,480
Speaker 1: But I want to push back on that because the

635
00:31:07,480 --> 00:31:10,559
medical timeline just doesn't add up perfectly. If it was

636
00:31:10,640 --> 00:31:14,480
a massive dose of ergut, where are the other physical symptoms?

637
00:31:14,799 --> 00:31:17,000
Speaker 2: That's the glaring hole in the official story.

638
00:31:17,359 --> 00:31:21,200
Speaker 1: Ergut poisoning typically presents with severe gangreen, the restricting of

639
00:31:21,200 --> 00:31:23,799
blood flow that causes limbs to turn black and die.

640
00:31:24,640 --> 00:31:27,920
But in Paul senuspri the symptom profile leaned almost exclusively

641
00:31:27,960 --> 00:31:32,720
into pure acute psychosis and spectacular hallucinations. It feels too

642
00:31:32,839 --> 00:31:34,359
clean to target into the brain.

643
00:31:34,519 --> 00:31:38,599
Speaker 2: Your skepticism is shared by many modern toxicologists and investigative journalists.

644
00:31:38,680 --> 00:31:39,880
Speaker 1: Okay, what do they think of it?

645
00:31:39,920 --> 00:31:43,440
Speaker 2: The purely psychotic presentation of the symptoms has led researchers

646
00:31:43,480 --> 00:31:47,200
to scrutinized declassified documents from the era, specifically pertaining to

647
00:31:47,240 --> 00:31:49,440
the CIA's mk Ultra program.

648
00:31:49,680 --> 00:31:54,559
Speaker 1: Mk Ultra being the sprawling, highly illegal program aimed at

649
00:31:54,559 --> 00:31:58,160
developing chemical mind control weapons in interrogation serums.

650
00:31:58,160 --> 00:32:02,279
Speaker 2: Correct The evidence strongly suggests that the CIA, potentially in

651
00:32:02,319 --> 00:32:06,119
cooperation with certain factions of the French military, used ponts

652
00:32:06,119 --> 00:32:07,680
an a sprite as a field test.

653
00:32:07,839 --> 00:32:09,559
Speaker 1: A field test on a civilian town.

654
00:32:09,720 --> 00:32:13,559
Speaker 2: The theory posits that they introduced aerosolized LSD or perhaps

655
00:32:13,599 --> 00:32:16,960
covertly dosed the local food supply as part of a

656
00:32:17,039 --> 00:32:20,599
massive experiment to see how a foreign population would react

657
00:32:20,839 --> 00:32:23,519
to a sudden, widespread hallucinogenic attack.

658
00:32:23,720 --> 00:32:26,160
Speaker 1: I want you to sit with the sheer paranoia of

659
00:32:26,160 --> 00:32:30,880
that concept. Your morning baguette, the most comforting, routine, mundane

660
00:32:30,920 --> 00:32:33,240
part of your day, the anchor of your daily schedule,

661
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:36,680
is secretly weaponized to turn your entire town into a

662
00:32:36,720 --> 00:32:37,480
living nightmare.

663
00:32:37,599 --> 00:32:40,400
Speaker 2: When we weigh the official Ergot narrative against the chilling

664
00:32:40,400 --> 00:32:44,640
implications of those to classified intelligence documents, a profound psychological

665
00:32:44,720 --> 00:32:49,079
terror emerges. The ambiguity itself becomes a secondary weapon atima.

666
00:32:49,279 --> 00:32:52,319
Consider the survivors and their descendants to this day. The

667
00:32:52,359 --> 00:32:56,359
absolute truth remains buried in heavily redacted intelligence archives. The

668
00:32:56,440 --> 00:32:58,119
victims are denied closure.

669
00:32:58,039 --> 00:33:00,440
Speaker 1: Because they can never know for sure exactly.

670
00:33:00,440 --> 00:33:03,920
Speaker 2: They are left in a state of perpetual limbo, forced

671
00:33:03,960 --> 00:33:07,000
to wonder if their profound trauma, the loss of their

672
00:33:07,039 --> 00:33:10,319
loved ones to asylum walls or suicide, was simply a

673
00:33:10,359 --> 00:33:15,680
tragic agricultural accident or a calculated, cold blooded experiment by

674
00:33:15,720 --> 00:33:19,240
a foreign intelligence agency treating them as disposable assets.

675
00:33:19,359 --> 00:33:19,880
Speaker 1: Wow.

676
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:23,960
Speaker 2: That lack of resolution is a unique form of psychological torture.

677
00:33:24,079 --> 00:33:26,839
Speaker 1: It makes you question every piece of food you buy

678
00:33:27,200 --> 00:33:29,920
and every institution that promises to keep you safe.

679
00:33:30,000 --> 00:33:31,559
Speaker 2: It definitely breaks that trust.

680
00:33:31,799 --> 00:33:34,279
Speaker 1: But as terrifying as it is when the CIA and

681
00:33:34,319 --> 00:33:36,920
the Ministry of Defense hide their actions in the shadows,

682
00:33:37,359 --> 00:33:40,720
using secrecy to shield their morality, some of the most

683
00:33:40,759 --> 00:33:42,599
gruesome horrors were not hidden at all.

684
00:33:42,680 --> 00:33:43,200
Speaker 2: Oh they were.

685
00:33:43,359 --> 00:33:46,680
Speaker 1: They were officially sanctioned, They were meticulously recorded in journals,

686
00:33:47,160 --> 00:33:51,279
and they were a carryout in sterile, brightly lit clinical settings.

687
00:33:51,440 --> 00:33:55,079
Speaker 2: Here we must confront the deeply uncomfortable dual nature of

688
00:33:55,160 --> 00:33:58,680
medical advancement. The history of medicine is not a clean

689
00:33:58,799 --> 00:34:04,079
upward trajectory. Not Sometimes incredible progress is born from necessary,

690
00:34:04,200 --> 00:34:08,880
albeit brutal innovation, and sometimes it is borne from pure,

691
00:34:09,239 --> 00:34:12,519
unadulterated malice cloaked in the authority of science.

692
00:34:12,880 --> 00:34:15,239
Speaker 1: Let's look at the innovation side first, during World War Two,

693
00:34:15,719 --> 00:34:17,880
with a group that called themselves the Guinea.

694
00:34:17,599 --> 00:34:19,480
Speaker 2: Pig Club, a very apt name.

695
00:34:19,559 --> 00:34:22,960
Speaker 1: The protagonist of this story is Sir Archibald Mackindo, a

696
00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:28,039
brilliant Maverick plastic surgeon. He was tasked with treating Allied airmen,

697
00:34:28,199 --> 00:34:31,920
specifically RAF fighter pilots, whose faces and bodies had been

698
00:34:31,960 --> 00:34:36,239
absolutely destroyed by burning aviation fuel when their cockpits caught

699
00:34:36,239 --> 00:34:37,480
fire during dogfights.

700
00:34:37,920 --> 00:34:41,159
Speaker 2: The context here is vital for understanding the medical desperation.

701
00:34:41,840 --> 00:34:46,559
The mechanization of warfare and WWII, specifically, high octane aviation

702
00:34:46,679 --> 00:34:50,960
fuel burning at incredible temperatures in an enclosed cockpit created

703
00:34:51,000 --> 00:34:54,920
catastrophic thermal injuries that medical science had simply never encountered.

704
00:34:54,960 --> 00:34:56,239
Speaker 1: It was a whole new type of burn.

705
00:34:56,400 --> 00:34:59,280
Speaker 2: Yes, the standard burn treatments of the nineteen thirties, which

706
00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:03,079
usually involved tannic acid, were completely inadequate. They actually hardened

707
00:35:03,119 --> 00:35:06,440
the burned skin into a rigid shell, crippling the pilots further.

708
00:35:06,719 --> 00:35:10,440
Speaker 1: So Macindo is faced with these young men whose faces

709
00:35:10,440 --> 00:35:13,840
have essentially melted away. Because the science hadn't caught up.

710
00:35:13,880 --> 00:35:15,320
He couldn't just open a textbook.

711
00:35:15,400 --> 00:35:16,960
Speaker 2: Right, There was no established protocol.

712
00:35:17,159 --> 00:35:20,119
Speaker 1: He had to essentially use these incredibly brave men as

713
00:35:20,519 --> 00:35:24,159
human test subjects for trial and error experiments to rebuild

714
00:35:24,159 --> 00:35:27,800
their faces. And the procedure he developed, I have to

715
00:35:27,840 --> 00:35:31,440
be honest, Trying to visualize the mechanics of it is staggering.

716
00:35:31,719 --> 00:35:34,000
It was called the walking stock or the pedical graph.

717
00:35:34,119 --> 00:35:37,280
Speaker 2: It was a feed of desperate, gruesome biological engineering.

718
00:35:37,400 --> 00:35:39,599
Speaker 1: Let me see if I can explain the mechanism. To

719
00:35:39,679 --> 00:35:42,960
rebuild a nose or a jaw. They needed viable, thick skin.

720
00:35:43,719 --> 00:35:46,719
So Macado would cut a long flap of healthy skin

721
00:35:46,800 --> 00:35:49,400
from a man's chest or his thigh. Okay, but he

722
00:35:49,440 --> 00:35:52,199
couldn't just sever it completely like a patch, right, because

723
00:35:52,239 --> 00:35:54,159
if you just lap a piece of skin onto a

724
00:35:54,199 --> 00:35:57,480
severely burned face, the tissue will die because there's no

725
00:35:57,519 --> 00:35:58,039
blood flow.

726
00:35:58,239 --> 00:36:02,159
Speaker 2: Exactly. The foundational challenge of skin grafting is vascularization. A

727
00:36:02,199 --> 00:36:06,079
piece of tissue needs a continuous, unbroken supply of oxygenated

728
00:36:06,119 --> 00:36:07,000
blood to survive.

729
00:36:07,280 --> 00:36:10,039
Speaker 1: So to solve this, Macado would leave one end of

730
00:36:10,039 --> 00:36:12,639
the skin flap attached to the leg or chest. He

731
00:36:12,679 --> 00:36:14,880
would roll the middle of the flap into a tube

732
00:36:15,280 --> 00:36:18,880
a literal fleshy trunk, and sow the other end to

733
00:36:18,920 --> 00:36:19,639
the man's.

734
00:36:19,360 --> 00:36:22,119
Speaker 2: Face, so they were physically tethered to themselves.

735
00:36:22,239 --> 00:36:25,000
Speaker 1: Yes, the circulatory system of the leg had a pump

736
00:36:25,039 --> 00:36:27,079
blood all the way up through this tube of flesh

737
00:36:27,280 --> 00:36:30,000
to keep the facial graft alive until it could slowly

738
00:36:30,039 --> 00:36:32,039
grow its own new blood vessels on the face.

739
00:36:32,440 --> 00:36:35,320
Speaker 2: It's akin to running an extension cord from a working

740
00:36:35,400 --> 00:36:38,199
generator to power a new house until the house can

741
00:36:38,239 --> 00:36:39,719
finally connect to the main grid.

742
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:42,840
Speaker 1: What a great analogy, But the human cost of that

743
00:36:42,920 --> 00:36:46,679
extension cord is unimaginable. These men had to live for weeks,

744
00:36:46,800 --> 00:36:50,000
sometimes months, locked and rigid unnatural postures.

745
00:36:50,239 --> 00:36:53,039
Speaker 2: The physical endurance required is just astounding.

746
00:36:53,360 --> 00:36:55,920
Speaker 1: They walked around the hospital wards with literal trunks of

747
00:36:55,960 --> 00:36:58,639
their own flesh connecting their arms to their noses or

748
00:36:58,679 --> 00:37:02,119
their chest to their jaws. They humorously named themselves the

749
00:37:02,119 --> 00:37:05,320
guinea Pig Club because they were fully painfully aware they

750
00:37:05,360 --> 00:37:08,840
were part of a gruesome, highly experimental trial and error process.

751
00:37:09,320 --> 00:37:11,960
Speaker 2: So what does this all mean? This is where we

752
00:37:12,039 --> 00:37:16,719
must frame this gauntlet of pain accurately. Macendo's work founded

753
00:37:16,760 --> 00:37:20,880
modern plastic surgery. Right the paradox here is profound. The

754
00:37:20,960 --> 00:37:25,079
process was brutally painful, it was highly disfiguring in the interim,

755
00:37:25,360 --> 00:37:28,360
and the suffering was immense. Yet it was done with

756
00:37:28,400 --> 00:37:31,840
the explicit, desperately empathetic goal of healing.

757
00:37:31,880 --> 00:37:34,119
Speaker 1: You wanted to give them their lives back exactly.

758
00:37:34,159 --> 00:37:37,400
Speaker 2: It restored functionality and dignity to men who had sacrificed

759
00:37:37,480 --> 00:37:40,960
everything for the war effort. It represents the absolute bleeding

760
00:37:41,079 --> 00:37:43,559
edge of medical progress, driven by necessity.

761
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:47,719
Speaker 1: It really highlights the sheer, unspoken agony behind the heroic,

762
00:37:47,840 --> 00:37:51,559
polished tales of the RAF. Those men were heroes twice over,

763
00:37:51,639 --> 00:37:53,840
once in the sky taking bullets, and again on the

764
00:37:53,880 --> 00:37:58,159
operating table, enduring unimaginable pain to advance science without a doubt.

765
00:37:58,239 --> 00:38:00,239
But if the Guinea Pig Club was a brutal primes

766
00:38:00,400 --> 00:38:03,119
aimed at healing and informed consent, our next topic is

767
00:38:03,119 --> 00:38:06,920
a stark, horrifying contrast. It is a purely malicious medical

768
00:38:06,960 --> 00:38:09,400
study that occurred right across the ocean. Devoid of any

769
00:38:09,400 --> 00:38:12,039
empathy whatsoever, We have to talk about the nineteen thirty

770
00:38:12,039 --> 00:38:13,519
two Tuskegee syphilis study.

771
00:38:13,719 --> 00:38:17,320
Speaker 2: This represents perhaps the darkest chapter in American medical history.

772
00:38:17,599 --> 00:38:22,079
Precisely because the institution actively orchestrated the suffering of its subjects.

773
00:38:22,519 --> 00:38:24,880
Speaker 1: My tone has to shift here because this isn't just

774
00:38:24,920 --> 00:38:29,480
a grim historical curiosity. It is a profound, calculated tragedy.

775
00:38:29,639 --> 00:38:32,199
It is Starting in nineteen thirty two, the United States

776
00:38:32,280 --> 00:38:36,719
Public Health Service, a federal agency, began tracking six hundred

777
00:38:36,760 --> 00:38:40,119
black men in Macon County, Alabama. The stated goal of

778
00:38:40,159 --> 00:38:43,239
the researchers was to study the natural progression of untreated

779
00:38:43,280 --> 00:38:44,719
syphilis in the human body.

780
00:38:44,800 --> 00:38:46,000
Speaker 2: But there is a massive deception.

781
00:38:46,280 --> 00:38:50,960
Speaker 1: Yes, here is the monumental ethical breach. These men were

782
00:38:51,000 --> 00:38:54,440
never informed that they had a life threatening sexually transmitted disease.

783
00:38:54,920 --> 00:38:57,400
They were simply told they were being treated for bad blood.

784
00:38:57,679 --> 00:38:59,960
Speaker 2: The term bad blood is crucial here. It was a low,

785
00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:03,320
localized colloquialism that covered a wide range of generic, non

786
00:39:03,320 --> 00:39:06,360
fatal ailments, everything from anemia to simple fatigue.

787
00:39:06,400 --> 00:39:07,960
Speaker 1: So it meant nothing really right.

788
00:39:08,320 --> 00:39:11,000
Speaker 2: By using this term, the doctors engaged in a deliberate,

789
00:39:11,039 --> 00:39:16,000
systemic obfuscation of the men's actual terminal diagnosis.

790
00:39:15,599 --> 00:39:20,039
Speaker 1: And for decades the researchers just watched. They watched as

791
00:39:20,079 --> 00:39:24,159
these men slowly deteriorated syphilis isn't a quick death.

792
00:39:24,320 --> 00:39:25,679
Speaker 2: No, it's a slow degradation.

793
00:39:25,920 --> 00:39:28,840
Speaker 1: They watched as the men went blind, they watched as

794
00:39:28,880 --> 00:39:32,599
they became paralyzed. They watched as tertiary syphilis ravaged their

795
00:39:32,639 --> 00:39:38,519
nervous systems, causing irreversible brain damage and cardiovascular collapse. They

796
00:39:38,679 --> 00:39:41,679
literally took notes on their suffering without lifting a finger

797
00:39:41,719 --> 00:39:42,199
to stop it.

798
00:39:42,480 --> 00:39:45,280
Speaker 2: And we must emphasize that this wasn't an oversight. It

799
00:39:45,400 --> 00:39:48,719
was the explicit design of the study. The researchers wanted

800
00:39:48,719 --> 00:39:51,199
to record the full pathology of the disease, right up

801
00:39:51,239 --> 00:39:52,320
to the autopsy table.

802
00:39:52,519 --> 00:39:55,119
Speaker 1: But the absolute peak of this malice, the moment that

803
00:39:55,199 --> 00:39:58,519
cements this as pure evil, happens in the nineteen forties.

804
00:39:59,079 --> 00:40:02,440
Penicillinis dis covered and it becomes widely available as the

805
00:40:02,480 --> 00:40:05,679
standard one hundred percent effective cure for syphilis.

806
00:40:05,800 --> 00:40:10,039
Speaker 2: At that exact moment, the medical community possessed a silver bullet.

807
00:40:10,519 --> 00:40:13,880
The ethical mandate, the bedrock of the Hippocratic oath, was absolute,

808
00:40:14,000 --> 00:40:15,320
cure the patients immediately.

809
00:40:15,400 --> 00:40:19,239
Speaker 1: But they didn't. The researchers intentionally withheld the penicillin from

810
00:40:19,239 --> 00:40:21,880
these six hundred men. It's just evil, and they went

811
00:40:21,920 --> 00:40:26,239
even further to ensure their experiment wasn't ruined. The directors

812
00:40:26,280 --> 00:40:29,199
of the study actually created lists of the participants' names

813
00:40:29,599 --> 00:40:33,599
and distributed these lists to local doctors, clinics, and even

814
00:40:33,679 --> 00:40:35,360
draft boards across Alabama.

815
00:40:35,400 --> 00:40:36,639
Speaker 2: A blacklist. Essentially.

816
00:40:36,840 --> 00:40:40,039
Speaker 1: Yes, the list came with explicit written orders, do not

817
00:40:40,079 --> 00:40:42,440
treat these men with antibiotics if they come to you

818
00:40:42,519 --> 00:40:45,800
for help. They actively blocked these men from receiving a

819
00:40:45,840 --> 00:40:49,679
known cure, ensuring they remained horribly ill so that the

820
00:40:49,719 --> 00:40:53,639
researchers could eventually perform autopsies and study their ravaged bodies

821
00:40:53,679 --> 00:40:54,559
whence they passed away.

822
00:40:55,119 --> 00:40:58,719
Speaker 2: This is a fundamentally different paradigm than Macindo's surgical trials.

823
00:40:58,760 --> 00:41:01,119
This wasn't a desperate attempt to innovate a cure for

824
00:41:01,159 --> 00:41:05,440
an unsolvable problem. This was the absolute chilling lack of

825
00:41:05,480 --> 00:41:09,199
empathy required to watch generations of men, their wives, and

826
00:41:09,239 --> 00:41:12,079
their children suffer and die for the sake of abstract

827
00:41:12,119 --> 00:41:12,800
data collection.

828
00:41:13,119 --> 00:41:17,159
Speaker 1: It is the cold, calculated, administrative evil of creating do

829
00:41:17,239 --> 00:41:20,199
not treat lists. This isn't a tragic accident like a

830
00:41:20,199 --> 00:41:24,559
bursting the lasses tank. This is science being deliberately weaponized

831
00:41:24,559 --> 00:41:26,840
against a vulnerable, marginalized population.

832
00:41:27,280 --> 00:41:30,360
Speaker 2: What this forces us to confront is how systemic racism

833
00:41:30,559 --> 00:41:34,360
was seamlessly dressed up in white lab coats, legitimized by

834
00:41:34,400 --> 00:41:38,159
a federal institution and funded by taxpayer dollars. The men

835
00:41:38,199 --> 00:41:40,880
in the Tuskegee study were viewed not as patients, not

836
00:41:40,960 --> 00:41:43,960
as citizens, not even as human beings, but purely as

837
00:41:44,159 --> 00:41:48,360
raw biological materia to be harvested for data. The institution

838
00:41:48,519 --> 00:41:52,480
prioritized its observational curiosity over the fundamental human right to

839
00:41:52,559 --> 00:41:53,599
life and medical care.

840
00:41:53,719 --> 00:41:57,400
Speaker 1: It makes my blood boil. The Tuskegee experiment hit its

841
00:41:57,400 --> 00:42:01,000
cruelty behind the respected guys of scientific research. It used

842
00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:04,440
the authority of medicine as an impenetrable shield against scrutiny.

843
00:42:04,519 --> 00:42:04,960
Speaker 2: It did.

844
00:42:05,320 --> 00:42:07,960
Speaker 1: But as we move into our final topic, we see

845
00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:11,679
that sometimes the most monstrous acts don't bother hiding at all.

846
00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:14,159
They don't need the cover of darkness, or the excuse

847
00:42:14,199 --> 00:42:16,559
of a cold war, or the veil of the medical trial.

848
00:42:16,960 --> 00:42:19,679
Sometimes the cruelty is the point, and they charge admission

849
00:42:19,719 --> 00:42:20,079
to see it.

850
00:42:20,360 --> 00:42:23,239
Speaker 2: We are entering the realm of sanctioned spectacle. We are

851
00:42:23,239 --> 00:42:26,320
looking at how society can institutionalize degradation.

852
00:42:26,599 --> 00:42:30,159
Speaker 1: We are talking about human zoos and I want you

853
00:42:30,199 --> 00:42:32,679
to brace yourself for the timeline here, because it is

854
00:42:32,760 --> 00:42:36,000
incredibly easy to relegate this kind of barbarism to the

855
00:42:36,039 --> 00:42:36,760
ancient past.

856
00:42:36,880 --> 00:42:39,639
Speaker 2: People always assumed this was centuries ago, right, But.

857
00:42:39,639 --> 00:42:43,199
Speaker 1: This is modern history as recently as nineteen fifty eight.

858
00:42:43,679 --> 00:42:47,480
Major world cities we are talking about Brussels, Paris, and

859
00:42:47,599 --> 00:42:51,480
New York City featured human zoos nineteen fifty eight.

860
00:42:51,519 --> 00:42:54,079
Speaker 2: That is well within the living memory of millions of

861
00:42:54,079 --> 00:42:56,679
people walking the earth today. It was the era of

862
00:42:56,719 --> 00:42:59,679
the space race, of television, and of human beings.

863
00:42:59,719 --> 00:43:03,239
Speaker 1: In cases, indigenous people from Africa, from Asia, and from

864
00:43:03,239 --> 00:43:07,519
the Americas were kidnapped, were violently coerced through fraudulent contracts

865
00:43:07,760 --> 00:43:10,679
into being shipped across the ocean and displayed in natural

866
00:43:10,679 --> 00:43:12,480
habitats behind iron fences.

867
00:43:12,119 --> 00:43:13,760
Speaker 2: And cages, stripped of all dignity.

868
00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:16,360
Speaker 1: Visitors would literally pay admission at a ticket booth to

869
00:43:16,400 --> 00:43:18,599
throw food at them, or to stand around and watch

870
00:43:18,599 --> 00:43:22,920
them perform primitive tasks. Let's look at one specific localized

871
00:43:23,000 --> 00:43:25,920
horror to ground this the Bronx Zoo right in the

872
00:43:25,960 --> 00:43:27,760
heart of New York City. In nineteen oh.

873
00:43:27,760 --> 00:43:29,800
Speaker 2: Six, the case of tebangk Yes.

874
00:43:30,320 --> 00:43:34,320
Speaker 1: The zoo directors acquired a young Conglese man named Odebenga,

875
00:43:35,519 --> 00:43:37,360
and they didn't put him in a cultural exhibit. They

876
00:43:37,400 --> 00:43:38,440
locked him in the monkey house.

877
00:43:39,000 --> 00:43:42,880
Speaker 2: We must dissect the semiotics of that decision. The deliberate

878
00:43:42,920 --> 00:43:45,440
placement of a human being in the primate exhibit was

879
00:43:45,480 --> 00:43:48,519
a calculated visual argument for white supremacy.

880
00:43:48,599 --> 00:43:50,000
Speaker 1: It was entirely intentional.

881
00:43:50,239 --> 00:43:53,400
Speaker 2: Yes, it was an attempt by the scientific and zoological

882
00:43:53,519 --> 00:43:57,559
establishment to present a living, breathing, evolutionary hierarchy to the

883
00:43:57,559 --> 00:44:01,559
general public, positioning indigenous post populations as a missing link

884
00:44:01,599 --> 00:44:03,880
between apes and civilized Europeans.

885
00:44:04,159 --> 00:44:07,920
Speaker 1: The zoo staff forced Odebenga to carry an orangutan around

886
00:44:07,960 --> 00:44:11,239
and physically play with it in the enclosure while thousands

887
00:44:11,280 --> 00:44:15,440
of people, families, children crowded around the iron bars, gawking,

888
00:44:15,559 --> 00:44:16,679
pointing and laughing.

889
00:44:16,400 --> 00:44:17,440
Speaker 2: At him disgusting.

890
00:44:17,480 --> 00:44:19,280
Speaker 1: When he wasn't locked in the cage with the apes,

891
00:44:19,400 --> 00:44:21,199
they gave him a bow and arrow and forced him

892
00:44:21,239 --> 00:44:24,079
to perform archery for the amusement of the crowds. I

893
00:44:24,159 --> 00:44:27,280
feel deep physical revulsion just trying to picture the scene.

894
00:44:27,719 --> 00:44:31,559
Picture a family eating cotton candy on a sunny Sunday afternoon,

895
00:44:32,000 --> 00:44:34,880
laughing at a kidnapped human being locked in a cage.

896
00:44:34,960 --> 00:44:36,639
Speaker 2: It's an irreconcilable image.

897
00:44:36,719 --> 00:44:40,880
Speaker 1: It completely shatters the comforting illusion that monsters only exist

898
00:44:41,000 --> 00:44:43,800
in the dark, or in the distant past, or in

899
00:44:43,840 --> 00:44:45,320
the extremes of wartime.

900
00:44:45,559 --> 00:44:50,199
Speaker 2: This tragedy synthesizes the overarching theme of our entire conversation today.

901
00:44:50,840 --> 00:44:54,679
What Odebanga's imprisonment and the World's Fair Human Zoos of

902
00:44:54,760 --> 00:44:59,679
nineteen fifty eight demonstrate is how societal frameworks, polite society,

903
00:44:59,679 --> 00:45:04,800
and trusted cultural institutions can perfectly normalize the absolute peak

904
00:45:04,880 --> 00:45:05,519
of cruelty.

905
00:45:05,920 --> 00:45:07,239
Speaker 1: Because these weren't secrets.

906
00:45:07,480 --> 00:45:11,000
Speaker 2: No, these were not friend underground illegal events run by

907
00:45:11,000 --> 00:45:12,199
criminals in the shadows.

908
00:45:12,280 --> 00:45:15,159
Speaker 1: They were mainstream family attractions. They were advertised in the

909
00:45:15,199 --> 00:45:18,960
Sunday newspapers. They were often funded or heavily subsidized by

910
00:45:19,000 --> 00:45:22,559
local governments and endorsed by prominent scientists of the day.

911
00:45:22,760 --> 00:45:26,599
Speaker 2: And that is the terrifying mechanism of normalization. When the government,

912
00:45:26,639 --> 00:45:29,760
the scientific community, and polite society all collectively agree that

913
00:45:29,840 --> 00:45:33,840
a monstrous act is actually acceptable entertainment or necessary research,

914
00:45:34,280 --> 00:45:37,480
the moral compass of the general public completely recalibrates.

915
00:45:37,559 --> 00:45:39,760
Speaker 1: That's the scariest part the fact.

916
00:45:39,440 --> 00:45:42,719
Speaker 2: That thousands of everyday, law abiding citizens could look at

917
00:45:42,719 --> 00:45:45,840
a man in a monkey cage and feel genuine amusement

918
00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:49,880
rather than profound horror. Forces are reckoning. It proves how

919
00:45:49,920 --> 00:45:53,280
incredibly thin the veneer of civilization truly is, and how

920
00:45:53,360 --> 00:45:56,159
easily our empathy can be switched off by authority.

921
00:45:56,920 --> 00:45:59,840
Speaker 1: It really makes you realize that normal isn't an absolute

922
00:45:59,840 --> 00:46:04,199
moname moral standard. Normal is just whatever society collectively agrees

923
00:46:04,280 --> 00:46:06,679
upon at the time, no matter how deeply depraved it

924
00:46:06,719 --> 00:46:09,559
actually is. Absolutely which brings us to the end of

925
00:46:09,559 --> 00:46:12,440
our journey today. Let's take a breath and look back

926
00:46:12,480 --> 00:46:14,760
at the shadows we've walked through. We started with the

927
00:46:14,840 --> 00:46:18,559
terrifying fragility of the mind, where the uncontrollable mass hysteria

928
00:46:18,599 --> 00:46:21,760
of the Dancing plague in fifteen eighteen and the Tanganika

929
00:46:21,840 --> 00:46:25,320
laughter epidemic proved that stress and suggestion can weaponize our

930
00:46:25,360 --> 00:46:26,400
own bodies against us.

931
00:46:26,960 --> 00:46:30,840
Speaker 2: We then examined the sheer, unforgiving physics of industrial hubris,

932
00:46:30,880 --> 00:46:34,599
where millions of gallons of molasses and fermenting beer destroyed neighborhoods,

933
00:46:34,880 --> 00:46:39,360
exposing not just structural failures but the chaotic, opportunistic underbelly

934
00:46:39,400 --> 00:46:41,880
of human behavior in the wake of sudden disaster.

935
00:46:42,320 --> 00:46:45,199
Speaker 1: We choked on the lethal, acidic Great Smog of London,

936
00:46:45,440 --> 00:46:48,440
where a government prioritized coal profits over the lungs of

937
00:46:48,519 --> 00:46:52,840
twelve thousand suffocating citizens and then lied to cover its tracks.

938
00:46:52,960 --> 00:46:56,159
Speaker 2: We uncovered the profound betrayal of the Cold War, where

939
00:46:56,199 --> 00:46:58,880
the UK Ministry of Defense and the CIA used their

940
00:46:58,920 --> 00:47:03,800
own citizens and out as unwitting labrats, releasing germ warfare

941
00:47:03,840 --> 00:47:07,000
and allegedly testing mind altering drugs from the shadows.

942
00:47:07,199 --> 00:47:10,599
Speaker 1: And finally we confronted the sanctioned cruelty of the establishment.

943
00:47:11,079 --> 00:47:14,360
We saw the desperate, agonizing medical gauntlet of the Guinea

944
00:47:14,360 --> 00:47:17,960
Pig Club contrasted against the cold, calculated malice of the

945
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:22,039
Tuskegee Syphilis Study. And we ended with the ultimate institutional

946
00:47:22,079 --> 00:47:26,039
dehumanization of human zoos, which turned kidnapping and racism into

947
00:47:26,039 --> 00:47:27,800
a Sunday afternoon family spectacle.

948
00:47:27,880 --> 00:47:28,840
Speaker 2: It's a lot to process.

949
00:47:28,920 --> 00:47:31,199
Speaker 1: It is to you, the listener, who has stayed with

950
00:47:31,280 --> 00:47:33,760
us through this darkness. History is not just what is

951
00:47:33,800 --> 00:47:37,079
written in the sanitized, triumphant chapters of a high school textbook.

952
00:47:37,360 --> 00:47:39,079
History is the shadows left behind.

953
00:47:39,280 --> 00:47:40,920
Speaker 2: It's the parts they tried to erase.

954
00:47:41,440 --> 00:47:46,159
Speaker 1: These events are a stark, vital reminder the progress is

955
00:47:46,239 --> 00:47:50,320
not an inevitable straight line upward. The people in these

956
00:47:50,360 --> 00:47:54,159
stories Protrafea dancing until her feet bled, the young girls

957
00:47:54,199 --> 00:47:57,280
suffocating on their own laughter, and tank Anika, the victims

958
00:47:57,320 --> 00:48:00,400
encased in Boston molasses, the men of the Guinea Pigs Club,

959
00:48:00,440 --> 00:48:03,480
and Tuskegee and ode Benga. They were not just characters

960
00:48:03,480 --> 00:48:04,239
in a dark movie.

961
00:48:04,280 --> 00:48:05,119
Speaker 2: They were real people.

962
00:48:05,199 --> 00:48:07,840
Speaker 1: They were real individuals. Their lives, their bodies, and their

963
00:48:07,880 --> 00:48:11,519
minds were destroyed by the greed, the unregulated curiosity, or

964
00:48:11,519 --> 00:48:13,079
the normalized cruelty of others.

965
00:48:13,119 --> 00:48:14,679
Speaker 2: And as we close this deep dive, I want to

966
00:48:14,760 --> 00:48:17,440
leave you with a final provocative thought to examine your

967
00:48:17,480 --> 00:48:20,519
own worldview. We look back at nineteen fifty eight and

968
00:48:20,559 --> 00:48:24,719
we are rightfully viscerally horrified that human zoos were considered

969
00:48:25,039 --> 00:48:28,719
mainstream family entertainment. We look back at the Tuskegee study

970
00:48:28,800 --> 00:48:31,840
and we are sickened that covert medical testing was justified

971
00:48:31,880 --> 00:48:36,000
by professionals for the sake of abstract scientific progress. So

972
00:48:36,119 --> 00:48:40,440
the vital question you must ask yourself is this what

973
00:48:40,599 --> 00:48:44,440
widespread practices today? Things that are currently sanctioned by our

974
00:48:44,480 --> 00:48:48,760
modern institutions, perfectly legal and broadly accepted by polite society.

975
00:48:48,840 --> 00:48:51,679
Right now, will the history books of tomorrow look back

976
00:48:51,719 --> 00:48:54,320
on with absolute unmitigated horror?

977
00:48:54,639 --> 00:48:58,000
Speaker 1: That is a chilling question. Which of these forgotten historical

978
00:48:58,039 --> 00:49:00,199
facts shocked you the most and how does it change

979
00:49:00,239 --> 00:49:02,280
where you place your trust to day? What is your

980
00:49:02,320 --> 00:49:04,880
stand on how we hold history accountable? Leave a comment

981
00:49:04,880 --> 00:49:07,079
down below with your answer. We want to hear from you.

982
00:49:07,320 --> 00:49:09,440
We are the architects of the history that the future

983
00:49:09,440 --> 00:49:12,679
will judge. Keep questioning the structures around you, keep digging

984
00:49:12,679 --> 00:49:14,639
into the shadows, and we will see you next time

985
00:49:14,639 --> 00:49:15,480
on thrilling threads.