December 23, 2025 • 42 mins
Welcome to the end of the year, fellow Ridiculous Historians! As Ben, Noel and Max look back on the events of 2025, they discovered historians do, in fact, have one year singled out as "the worst year in human history." But... why? Join the guys as they explore how DXXXVI absolutely wrecked Europe, the Middle East and Asia -- with consequences that reverberate in the modern day.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it from one of
the best super producers in the game. Mister Max Williams
is mister Americ Max Boy. It's Max.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
That's facts.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's the song, that's what it was.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
That's also mister Noel Brown. They call me Ben Bullen.
We're here at the end of twenty twenty five where
versus the precipice?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Are we on the Precipice twenty six?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, we're recording on Thursday, December eighteenth, and at this
time of the year, you know what's since we're referencing songs,
you know, this is a time for reflection, looking back
play counting Crow's Long December.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I was gonna say, there is reason to believe that
maybe this year will be better than the last. It
is a reflect I didn't even put that together. It's
absolutely reflective song about the following year.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Ben.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
You did this episode research and I think it's actually
really helpful for this time of year, especially given you know,
conditions that maybe we can harken back to a time
that was, you know, unequivocally measurably worse than the time
we're currently living in.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And also no.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Spoiler alert that we survived ah as a civilization.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Hey, there we go, folks, chin up, chest out, thanks
for joining us. It's the end of the year as
we know it, and we feel fine.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Have you seen them the most recent episode of Pluribus
been I have not, actually, so the cold open involves
the main character, Carol, singing in her car as she's driving,
trying to have a chin up attitude about the end
of the world, as is portrayed in that show more
or less, and she gets to the ni feel and
then it cuts off, and that's the cold open. I
(02:19):
just think it's such a clever Vince Gilligan little touch.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I love that guy. I love Vince, so we'll probably
meet him later on this show. We've noted this in
more somber moments, Nolan max that the world is ending
for someone somewhere at every second of every day. And
it's also true to your earlier point, Noel, that throughout history,
one group or another has inevitably claimed this year for real,
(02:47):
this tybet, guys, this year is the actual end of
the world is the worst year ever, it's a fall
of civilization, cats and dogs sleeping together, etc. We are
happy to report, folks to Know's earlier points that so
far throughout human history, all of those apocalyptic doomsday predictions
(03:08):
have been cartoonishly incorrect.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
And kats and dogs sleeping together a good thing, sort
of like the lion lying down with the lamb? Or
is that is that a bad sign?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Cats and dog are a bad thing, which is sad
because if you go on YouTube you can find so
many great videos of cats and dogs.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
They're great.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Come this morning, So you're saying, once we start seeing
cats and dogs getting along, then the end is nigh. Yes, okay,
we're seeing keep an eye.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
That's what people had said, because they were They were
honestly being kind of dickish, a word I wouldn't usually use,
but on both Ridiculous History and our sister show Stuff,
they don't want you to know. We look at a
lot of those culty warnings. Please do check out our
previous episodes for more crazy stories of times people were
(03:55):
wrong about the end of the world.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Oh yeah, they got it back where there's always some
caveat what what caused the little mix up and we'll
get it right the next time, and they never really do.
Just here we are, can either of y'all ever seen
in the wild someone carrying the end is nigh sign
on the that's the kind of thing you do see
like in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Where the Yeah, yeah, I think the stick is lazy.
I miss the old sandwich boards. Landwich boards.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, it's got a little
front and a back and potentially the individual is nude underneath.
You know, you never unless you can take a peek
from the side, which I would not advise.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah, we don't advise, uh side eyeing sandwich board.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Profits sandwich board crazies. Well, okay, one person's crazy is
another person's profits, Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
The next question, though, becomes okay, So first off, yes,
a lot of cult leaders will go and gather a
group of followers and say, yes, the world is ending
September seventeenth or December eighteenth, whatever, And then the date
comes to pass low and behold the world continues, and
they say, actually, we got the math a little wrong.
(05:10):
They'll usually kick it a few years in the future
or even a few months, and they'll say okay, no
for real this time, you guys, it's so January eighteenth totally.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
And you know who's been popping up a lot lately
in the pop culture. That Marshall apple White cat remember him? Oh,
I thought you were going to say the shamwell guy,
he's around, But that Marshall apple White, the bigt heead date, Ye,
Heaven's Gate, dude?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
That was that?
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Was that a doomsday cult technically because they were really
they wanted to get transported away by extraterrestrials. Yes, and
it was an event that was timed with a passage
of a comment, so there is a day and date
to that. But you could argue that it's not apocalyptic
per se, and well it did all die.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
They did think there was an apocalypse. The website is
still active because they left a couple of people behind.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
God, I bet it's GeoCities af right.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Our next question, though, despite all these weird incorrect predictions,
our next question is a little tougher to dismiss. This
is the focus of our exploration today, folks. Was there
ever a worst year in history? Logically, if you look
at all the years of human civilization, there has to
(06:25):
be one, right, There has to be one worst year ever,
and a lot of us in the audience tonight we're
probably gonna say for various reasons. Yeah, guys, this is
the worst year, just like we said in twenty twenty four,
just like we said in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty one, that's gonna scale two, right, twenty twenty
(06:48):
twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I guess you got to kind of judge the president
based on the events of the past, and we're looking
a little farther back into the past for today's reference point.
But to what you're saying, Ben, I mean, it is
easy to get caught up in the moment, say, gosh,
this year suck that it suck for me personally because
I had maybe some job issues or some money problems,
or family issues, romantic issues, family tragedies, whatever it might be.
(07:14):
We're looking at it much more big picture than that,
and I think a lot of the things that people
are hung up on now are pretty big picture. And
we're not a political show. We're not going to get
into the nuts and bolts of that. But there are
certainly quite a large percentage of the population that are
feeling a certain way about the right now. So We're
going to take you back, back, back, back back to
(07:35):
a time that I think we can all agree, for
various reasons, was worse.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yes. Yeah, maybe future historians will look back and say,
you know, twenty twenty five, twenty twenty four, twenty twenty
three is a worse year whatever, whatever, But as we
are going to see, as you so beautifully set up
in today's episode. No, some current historians, quite a few,
have already picked a winner for the worst year in
(08:03):
human history. Five thirty six CE, they argue, was the
worst year ever knew me, right, Yeah, okay, here we go.
So the year we call five thirty six CE or
d x x x v I if you're.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Nasty now, Ben, I would argue, it would be pronounced
D triple x v I if you were nasty, right,
or the.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Adults only if you're nasty so, or if.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
You're just down for some titillating erotic drama.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
There we are. It's this year is already fairly unique.
It happened a long time ago. It's a leap year
in the Julian calendar.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, we could pretend ill right, maybe not.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I don't know why the Julian calendar.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
The lead dear man, you know how much of an
issue I have with leap year. I don't fel like
aple feast if we're in a leap year. It just
feels like there's an ill wind blow in and Maxis
is nodding his head.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
You got that.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Let's let let's see. Let's see you guys remember what
the difference between the leap year and Julian And.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
It's ridiculous too. It's ridiculous so much so that we
did an episode about it.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I remember we did the episode. But it will never
be a thing that I'm able to internalize if.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
You don't do a leap year when leap year's you know,
obviously every four years, but you don't do it when
it's a when it is a one hundred, so like
fifteen hundred, seventeen hundred, unless it's divisible.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
By four hundred.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Yeah, so, and it's like, what are they doing here?
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It is a fact?
Speaker 1 (10:09):
So okay, at the time, people just called five p
thirty six CE the year after the consulship of Belisarius.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
That sounds cool. Let's go with that. We'll say it
every time of the I do love a good year
of our Lord, which I know can vary depending on
the lord and the year. So if we wanted to
connect the dots and talk a little bit about what
this thing is, the Belisarius in question is our boy.
Flavius one of my favorite Roman names. I don't know why.
(10:39):
It just makes me think he's got swagger. Flavius Belisarius. Dude,
this guy is a proper war hero. He does have swagger.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, he was a military commander. He was working for
the Byzantine Emperor at the time, Justinian the First. The
Western Roman Empire had already collapsed less than an undred
years prior. Belisarius plays a huge role in regaining a
lot of that territory for the Byzantine Empire.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Go did military cat right? Yeah seriously.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah. Even now modern war historians will say he's one
of the greatest of all time or goat as we mentioned.
So it's new surprise that for a little bit of
history he had a whole year named after him.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I'm okay with that. It seems earned did others do
it or did he do it? He he did it himself.
He was the thought leader on that way. He killed
a lot of people in the process, and they named
a year after him. I will still argue that he did.
He put the work in, you know, he put the
work in. Yeah, he did the reps for sure. You
(11:47):
don't see these plaques, what plaques, the plaques in the
White House talking about talking about writing your own story again,
try to be political. I just think it's funny. I
just think we're seeing some Roman empire megalem miniaco bay
here in writing your own plaques. Other people sposed to
write those plaques.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Man, Yeah, I don't love it as an apolitical point. Uh,
the the leadership of the United States should represent all Americans.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
It's true. And I just also somebody that I love
on YouTube the Internet today guys pointed out that whenever
I see a plaque, I expect for some real dignified
shit to be written, right, dignified.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Something like no shirt, no shoes, no service.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Also, well, you know what, I've never seen that engraved
into brass. But but a plastic plaque is still a plaque.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Oh we go to different gas stations.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Wow, okay, you go to the fancy boy gas way
up on the hill. Oh gosh, we'll fly golden commodes
in the Japanese toilet seats.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Oh geez, I wonder if there's golden the day, it
would be sick.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
If there were more bidezing gas stations, it would keep things.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Cleaner, hopefully. Yeah, on paper it would work.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
You real, they do have the days in every public
restroom is in the Middle East. Oh yeah, yeah, I
mean then they're like wands. They're they're handheld, they're on
the wall.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
That's what shower nozzles. Uh. Five thirty six was a
long time ago. We do know a couple of things
about that year. It's when the Chinese Empress Dowager lieh
It was born. Probably, It's when the Emperor of Japan
on Kon died. It's when Pope I Goepettas died. But
(13:29):
those deaths alone are not what inspire historians to call
five three six the worst year. To answer that, to
figure out why people hate this year so much, we
got a journey back and we got to look at
the weather. One day, the sky goes dark.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, we are talking about some of the End is
nine kind of business here. In AD five thirty six,
when a mysterious cloud appeared over the Mediterranean basin, Ben,
I've got to just really quickly. The mysterious cloud has
triggered me. You know the character Galactus in the Fantastic
four universe, who's like a godlike entity, an eater of planets.
(14:11):
Do you know how the Fantastic Four franchise has been
sort of plagued in its depiction in cinema, Like the
original one I think was in the nineties and it
was made by Roger Korman and it was famously shelved
for money because it was so bad. Then the second
one was also bad, with Michael Chickliss as the thing.
Then the third one I've heard recently referred to as
the one where Galactus is a cloud because it was
(14:32):
like just the era where like in the most recent
one where he's this giant, you know, monstrosity, this like
what do you call it, like lovecrafting and you know,
entity transformer type figure, they didn't have the they didn't
have the tech for that in two thousand and one,
so they just made him a cloud. They were darkening
sterious cloud.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, they were harkening back to the Ultimate Galactus. Ultimate
we're talking about part of Marvel Universe, which is a.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Little bit it's historically a dark cloud is an ill
omen yes, very.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Much so, and people were getting super creeped out by
this dark, ultimate galactus level cloud, especially folks like a
Byzantine historian who's often quoted here. His name is pro Copious,
and he wrote, the Sun gave forth its light without brightness,
and it seemed exceedingly like the Sun in eclipse, for
(15:29):
the beams it shed were not clear.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, the went a bit of a route to get there,
but I think it's like blotting out the sun. He
also wrote that it seemed like the Sun was constantly
from that point on it eclipsed, and that during this
time here's are his words, men were free, neither from war,
nor pestilence, nor any other thing leading to death. All
(15:53):
things that are not good ben descended upon the planet
and where haralded by this dark, mysterious cloud.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Is crazy that there was not social media at the time.
People would have gone nuts on the internet if it existed.
This cloud. Yeah, this rules in and local climates are
cooling temperatures. In the summer of five point thirty six,
they fell several degrees celsius and this created the coldest
(16:22):
decade in the past two thousand, three hundred years. Snow
was falling in China in summer. In summer, there was
snow falling, crops were failing wide rife, as our pal
Frank would say.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
You would And are you saying the climate was changing.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
I'm saying the climate was chaotic.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
It was, But I'm just saying, like in what we
see today that is often described as climate change, not unusual,
not like historically without precedent, like the Ice Age, for example,
represented a massive hiccup in the climate. We're talking about here,
would be unseasonable in the climate brought on by at
the time, surely they knew.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Not what Yeah, and at an incredibly fast rate is
overnight kind of stuff, big ol'ponk. From five forty one
to five forty two. A pandemic follows on. It's called
(17:25):
the plague of Justinian. Guessing Justinian didn't make that one
up himself. That's just you know, he was in charge.
He gets saddled with the plague blame. Yeah, he's unlike
our war hero. He's in the meeting and he's yelling, you, guys,
I asked for a plaque, not a.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Plague, exactly, with some dignified ish, not one hundred percent
this thing that we're talking about, this cavalcade. This agglomeration,
as you'd say, been of bad stuff, absolutely ripped through
the Eastern Roman Empire and wiped out a third to
half of the entire population of that region. So, as
(18:02):
you can imagine, this led to some political turmoil. Yeah,
downright biblical.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
And at this point nobody knew what caused this. This
guy just went dim and dark, and most folks, if
you had a man on the street interview at this time,
they would say it's a punishment from their version of God.
They also did not have the privilege or the opportunity
to really investigate this horrific mystery because everybody was too
(18:33):
busy trying to stay alive, yeah, or just you know,
dying or die. Yeah. Yeah. Picture your ten favorite people,
five of them are gone. This is like, since we've
referenced Marvel films, this is like the Thanos snap, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
The Thanos snap or the Bowlin pop. Yes, exactly, I
appreciate the Bullen pop. It would take centuries of later
research to figure out what happened and how this global
disaster came to be. Ever since the nineteen nineties, when
(19:10):
scientists looked at tree rings studies or Dendo chronology. They
found something interesting. They said, Wait, the summers around the
year five forty CE or AD, whatever your preference is,
we're unusually cold. What happened before we get to the.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Really dark, dangerous part here, folks, As we said at
the top, your safe humanity survived. Humanity went on to
invent all sorts of neat stuff like velcros, synthesizers, radio,
even podcasts.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Velcrow is just the best. Yeah, it's pretty, it's it's
a sticky wicked for sure. It makes a satisfying sound
when you separate the pieces.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Oh yeah, one for all our sensation of friends in
the crowd. Historians returned to this question of what made
five thirty six so specifically enormously cartoonishly bad, and they
started to crack some interesting theories. Noel, could we go
to the medieval historian Michael McCormick.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Man, we must. Michael McCormick is an authority on these matters,
and he had this to say, along with his pal,
a glaciologist named Paul Maiuski, and they're operating within an
organization called the Climate Change Institute of the University of Maine,
leading a team investigating all sorts of things, among them glaciers.
So we're talking about using glaciers to measure historical events.
(20:34):
Probably not exactly the same as like ice cores, but
you know, definitely there are things contained in glaciers that
are that represent events from the past, you know, various
compositions of minerals and chemicals and might whatever it might be.
So through an intense analysis of these ice it would
be ice cores from a glacier over in Switzerland, they
determined that the doomsday level events that swept Europe, Asia
(20:58):
and the Middle East, it was unavoidable and perhaps just
a taste of the awfulness to come timeline. I don't
know that we've gotten there yet, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
It's a real ristler coaster. Yeah, it's a real roller
coaster today. Like you said, inevitable, unstoppable, right, the all
pass have led you to me the answer to the
riddle of what made five thirty six just so bad?
Volcados not just one a combo move of multiple volcanic eruptions.
(21:34):
There was one that was believed to be properly in
Iceland maybe another way in North America that spewed ash
across the entirety of the northern hemisphere early in the
year of five thirty six, followed by two other massive eruptions,
one in five forty one in five forty seven. And
this team, they've got some great work published in a
(21:58):
journal called Antiquity. They say the repeated blows, followed on
by a plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted
well until six forty and then there was a spike
they could find red again. They're reading the ice the
way you would read rings in a tree. They say
(22:18):
there's a spike in airborne lead that marks the resurgence
of silver mining. So Nola first. Our next question becomes
what makes these eruptions so dangerous? And maybe to answer that,
we get to lean on our house stuff works hats.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yes, because they are quite sturdy, those how stuff works hats,
so we can lean right on them. When a volcano erups,
its spew sulfur something called bismuth, which sounds like a
material you might find in the pits of Hell and
other substances, way way up into the atmosphere, where they
become aerosolized and form like a kind of bubble, a veil,
(22:55):
as it's often referred to. That can reflect the Sun's
light back out into space, cooling the planet, which you know,
when you said cooling, that sounds like relatively monocuous, but
we're talking extreme levels of cooling.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great point about
cooling sounding way less catastrophic than it is. These guys
were able to match the ice record of those chemical
traces you know in this ice core with tree bring
records of climate. And this is where we go to
a guy named Michael Siggle who was at the University
(23:32):
of Berne for a long time, and they found something predictive.
They said, look every pretty much every unusually cold summer
over the past two thousand and five hundred years was
directly preceded by a volcanic eruption. That's what inspired Mayeuski
and McCormick. In twenty thirteen, Biyuski's team took this seventy
(23:55):
two meter long ice core from the Swiss Alps and
they used in ultra high resolution method to what's the
best way to say this, we're not experts. They took
a laser that could carve very tiny slices of ice,
and with that they were able to say, look at this,
(24:18):
at this period of time for just a few days
or a few weeks there was snowfall right or they
could tell the weather with that level of sophistication, accuracy
and fidelity, and it was a frightening time capsule. You know,
they saw two thousand years fall out from volcanoes, Saharan
dust storms, human activity, and it's right there in the
(24:40):
center of Europe. This is nuts, man, They were watching
an action movie montage.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, just like really slowly, like the paint drying version
of an action movie montage. But we're glad that there
are smarter people than us that can do the work
there with the ice cores and all of this analysis
that takes a lot of discipline, into detail and patience.
So each of these samples, some fifty thousand from each
(25:06):
meter of the core, were analyzed for about a dozen
different elements of you know, checking to see where they
fell in the timeline that you can you know, kind
of put put together from analyzing these ice cores. The
approach enabled the team to pinpoint specific storms, specific volcanic eruptions,
and lead pollution down to the month with absolute precision,
(25:30):
or at least really really close to being right on
the money within a month or possibly even less within weeks,
so more research was to follow.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, here's what we found. It seems that the wind
and weather systems back then in five thirty six must
have been just right, just perfect for an apocalypse. It
guided the plume of this volcanic eruption southeast across Europe
later into Asia, and this vulcan canic fog rolled across
(26:02):
the land. There was, to be fair, there was nothing
civilization could have done to prevent this, and if something
like this happened today, there is little that modern civilization
could do to stop it. We're we're basically four volcanoes
away from the end of the world, for sure.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
And I guess we think of things we could do
as a society, as a civilation civilization to prevent these
kinds of things. I think the mind often jumps to
conservation efforts, and you know, reducing pollution and closing the
hole in the ozone layers of This is beyond any
of that, Yeah, right, Ben, This is not man made
or contributed to by any activity of human beings.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, this is past the pay grade of the Homo
sapien for sure. We don't want to lose hope, you know,
we want, we want to dream big. It's a long
December for everyone. There's a meason to believe, there's a
reason to believe there's something new and on the horizon, hopefully.
Five point thirty six was certainly unusual, It was certainly tough.
(27:05):
It led to a terrifying decade of chaos, but humanity
soldiered on. And the same research that taught humans about
volcanic eruptions also gives insight into how and when civilization recovered,
because the same ice that tells the story of disaster
tells the story of humanity getting back on its feet.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Well, I think we all love a good comeback story.
I mean, obviously, you know, with the atomic bombs dropped
on Japan, it was an absolute horrific event that's annihilated
most aspects of that civilization. But we also know that
the recovery and the rebuilding of Japan led to insane
advances and led to them being like top of the
(27:49):
heap in terms of technology and innovation and culture. And
you know, I just I love a rebuilding story rising
from the ashes. So we have that here, of course.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, yeah, let's go to Kyle Harper, a medieval and
Roman historian at the University of Oklahoma. He says, if
you look through these ice cores, you have a new
kind of record for understanding one of the most beautiful
words here, understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes
(28:22):
that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. And
Kyle says, if we could be familiar with you here,
Kyle Kyle says, this also shows us the earliest stirrings
of a new medieval economy. There was a spike. It
led in six point forty. There's another great name we
got to bring up here in an archaeologist called Christopher
(28:45):
love Luck. What a cool last day.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Sounds like a Harry Potter character, Very very cool. But
this also is connected to a story that we talked about,
I believe it was this year on our sister pod.
Something I want you to know when we do our
strange news segments about newer analysis of these lead levels
showing that lead contamination led to cognitive decline in the
(29:09):
Roman Empire. That's not the same thing we're talking about here.
We're talking about things well beyond the realms of intellect.
But we could also argue that what led to a
decline in their powers was also brought on by lead levels.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Oh yeah, yeah, making them dumber. Yes, yeah, yeah yeah.
Check out our upcoming stuff they'll want you to know
episode about the proposed connection between lead levels and serial killers. Again,
like you were saying, Noel, a little bit outside the
scope of this episode, but we're always going to be closing.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And we're looking at the lead levels here as a
positive because it represents new industry that was emerging.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Our buddy Christopher Loveluck over at the University of Nottingham
points out that these led levels are smoking gun evidence
of mining. So silver is smelted from this lead or
the lead is a sign that silver is back in business,
Silver is back in demand. The economy is rebounding from
(30:15):
these volcanic eruptions. You see another lead peak in six
point sixty. This means there was a ton of silver
going into the medieval economy, and it suggests that gold
became increasingly scarce because more people were trading, so you
had to move to silver. In essence, we don't have
(30:38):
any more Coca cola. Would you take a pepsi?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
No, I'd rather start, I'd rather die thirst. You're not
a pepsi guy, not onlike pepsi, not on like pepsi. No,
it insists upon itself, it really does. It's just it's
very syrapy. It's not my thing. And it also could
well be just where we live and the loyalty I
think we all have for the cocup.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
In here and say, I don't really feel much loyalty
to coke.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Now, I think.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
That's what I'm saying. It's it's like I don't really
even drink so that much. I don't really feel that
much loyalty to coke. And I think coke is vastly
spirit of pepsi. It's just it. It does. It insists
upon itself. It is the hata odyssey of sodas.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Oh yo, you got me back. That was a roller
coaster commet. You're manipulating me so well.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
You know else kind of insists upon themselves. The upper
middle class.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Ah, yes, yeah, I lovel merge.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
We don't we with that merchant class?
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, love Luck argues this is the Rise of the
Merchant Class.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Which is the most boring Marvel movie title of all.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Time, The Rise of the Merchant Class. I love, I
love ten minutes of it. I don't know if I
love two hours of it.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, I don't need it.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Just give me a YouTube review, right for sure.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
That's how we do our recent But there was a
cool YouTube you linked to Ben in this research from
Weird History, which is a great channel. In the videos
called year five thirty six was the worst year to
be alive? What happened? Right?
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah? In that video, which cites some of the research
we're citing here as well. We ultimately conclude the ice
has a lot to say for those who know how
to listen, and it shows us another Just following the
lead patterns is so weird because it shows us another
tough time in history. Lead vanishes again during the Black
(32:39):
Death from thirteen forty nine to.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Thirteen to fifty three. You know, you got to weigh
out a little bit. You gotta got lead or we
got the Black Death, right right, one or the other.
I said, a plaque, not a plague. It would be
insult to injury if we had both, is all I'm
getting it, you know. Yeah, rising lead levels and the
Black Death that would be just too much. But yeah,
black Death, I'm not meaning to make light. That was
(33:03):
another gnarly historical wiper outer of populations.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, it was not a great day for most people.
But this so we've solved the case, right, the boffins
have figured out that five point thirty six became a
terrible year that launched a thousand ships of disaster because
of volcanic eruptions. But is it the worst year ever?
Is it alarmist or a hyperbolic to call it that?
(33:29):
Maybe a little?
Speaker 2 (33:30):
I mean, the worst anything ever is in its very
nature hyperbolic. That is what that is.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, yeah, things.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Could always get worse. We also don't, well, I guess
we are talking about things that have happened. So if
you did the math, there's probably some arguments that could
be made that you could unequivocally rank it as s
tier worse year.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Jbe what of right, definitely one of the worst years.
It reminds me a little bit of that poem by W.
H Auden about the Old Masters. In the poem, he's
talking about this painting where Icarus is falling from the
sky because he got.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Too close to the sun.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, and the biggest, the twist of it, to spoil
this poem is that there's also a boat in the painting,
and the people on the boat do not care that
Icarus is falling. Their life is fine. So there are
populations in other parts of the world that don't know
five thirty six is the worst year ever because they
(34:33):
don't even have the calendar that tells them it's five
thirty six.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
It's a good point.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
They're just alive. And they might hear a traveler from
Afar who's who's like, hey, I'm from what we call
the world it's Western Europe spoiler, and everything's terrible there,
and they're like, hey man, we're fine, you know, welcome
to Botswana.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Well, you know, in theory, we are fine. If you've
ask forward to this year being on the cusp of
twenty twenty six, we are still sitting here in twenty
twenty five. Humanity has you know, persevered as we are
wont to do. Broken a lot of eggs in the
process of making that what is it? Civilizational omelet?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Nailed it, nailed it ten ten no notes. I like it.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I made an omelet this morning. It's on my mind.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
You did you make an omelet on a work day?
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I make an omelet in the morning. Yeah, I'm working
from home. I cook a nice little breakfast, made some
bacon and an omelet.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
That's coffel.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Yeah, I like fun. So we you make an omelet
on a workday that allowed on the weekend. That's crazy, man,
too hard, cool night, Nolan.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Nolan and I are friends because we have vastly different
religions and philosophy, and we have vastly different morning routine. Right,
Why do I sound scandalized?
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It was funny. I have to question it, but I'm
here for it, man. And then a workday not help
you if you put any garlic in it?
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Oh my gosh. I have so many questions that we
have to save for off air. And I love I
love getting to know you.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Oh so we're here for Yeah, podcasting is all about
but we're we're here making omelets literal and figurative. We
do still have some issues. Was the climate does seem
to be approaching levels of unpredictability that we've described in
this aforementioned worst year ever. Experts cross the planet are
proposing some pretty wild solutions as well. We remember that
(36:37):
guy we talked about this recently on Stuff that I
want you to know, who like he was just a guy.
He wasn't even like had no authority or was an
expert really, but he suggested like detonating an atomic beyonderground,
and that it would have some crazy effect of like
reducing pollution or I don't remember exactly, but I just
do remember that there was some there were some experts
saying it's crazy, but it just might work.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeahs, nuclear weaponry, NU clear technology is the shiny new
toy right up there with large language models are so
called artificial intelligence. So logically, a lot of people said,
I don't know, man, maybe we nuke stuff, Maybe we can.
Maybe nukes are the solution to all those problems we
(37:16):
created and cannot solve. But in that spirit, Noel. One
of the most well researched outlandish solutions is something we
talked about in a recent episode of Stuff They will want,
you know, Stratospheric aerosol injection or SAI. The ideas you
can just wish wish a lot of solid particle aerosols
(37:38):
into Earth's stratosphere and then that can help mitigate global warming.
That we're talking a fleet of airplanes, six thousand flights
every day, thirty eight million metric tons of sulfur dioxide
or similar stuff. Basically, the proposal is to artify create
(38:01):
conditions similar to five thirty.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Six c Can I just backcheck one split second, because
I think people are wondering. The dude I was talking
about was a twenty five year old Microsoft software engineer,
so an expert in something but not a climate change,
and he proposed, yeah, a precision detonation of a nuclear
bomb under the ocean that would quote, according to NDTV
(38:24):
dot com, viscerate the carbon absorbing rocks that make up
the seabed and causing rapid rock weathering at a scale
substantial enough to make a meaningful dent and atmospheric carbon levels.
It was also published in a non peer reviewed website,
not even a journal, a website. Just sorry, I just
I was reminded of this, this crazy idea, among many
(38:48):
other crazy ideas to do something about you know, what's
going on with the climate.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
So what we're telling you here, folks, is essentially that
people are attempting to artificially create a vault canic winter
like back in the halcyon days of five thirty six CE.
What do you think, pretty good year? Is it time
to roll the dice? Should we bring back five thirty six?
(39:14):
Just talk about retro? Right? Should we bring back five
thirty six? Well, we will talk about that and more
much more in the future as we're bringing in twenty
twenty six. Thank you as always for joining us on
our mad continuing adventures to boldly go into the most
(39:36):
ridiculous of history.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Are we mad cap? Ben?
Speaker 1 (39:40):
I think so?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Would we qualify?
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
We call these mad cap adventures. We can we even
go so far as to call them capers. Perhaps I
love a caper. Yeah, I love a heist.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, it's gonna start it on a heist, and even
a caper just on a bagel. You know, I'm done.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
You love a caper? I love a caper. It's a
delightful little what do you call like a bubble of flavor,
almost like a fish egg.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, there we go. That's a good comparison. We also
love you folks for supporting our little show and tuning
in with us. Give us a review.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, it all means, give us an end of the year,
give us the gift of a nice review, a little
at a boy, you know, help the sleep there it is.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
And we also want to give a big shout out
to our super producer, mister Max Williams, who cuts a
clever figure in a suit.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
We just cuts a real nice figure and he cuts
a mean podcast. Yeah, he also cuts. He'll cut you
if you look at him.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Funny, Oh, behave and big thanks to our composer Alex Williams.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
We're going to yoga together tonight, me and Alex. Oh,
we're doing a yoga m and ages. I'm looking forward.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
That's awesome. We also want to note that Jonathan Strickland
ak the Quister, did not show up to our holiday party.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
You know what. He didn't. But he's also allergic to
alcohol and shellfish, and both of those things were on
offer at this event, So he may well have died.
Perhaps perhaps he may well have choked him, chook the
life right out of him.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Well, he's contractually obligated to come back from the dead
and appear appear on Ridiculous History, so stay tuned for that.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
A ghost of Christmas future. Who do you think which
ghost would would would would he be? Or is he
just the scrooge of it all? He's the scrooge and
he likes that main character energy I want to be.
Whichever ghost was played by the guy from the New
York Dolls who drives the cab the blackout teeth.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah, yeah, we mentioned him previously as well. He's probably
one of my favorites too. We also have more people
to thank. Eve's jeffco christa vassiotis here in spirit. Yeah,
here in Christmas spirit. Nice one. What else should we, guys?
Should we just be the volcano that.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
We what you want to be? The volcano you wish
to see in the world. Yeah, which is hopefully not
that many active ones anymore. Well, there are three, there
are four of us. There's the three of us recording,
there's you joining us at home. So between four volcanoes,
we can the world. We can out the sun.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yes, believe in yourself. There we go. That's a show.
Tune in, uh, tune in later this week. We're gonna
get to some stuff we didn't get to in previous
episodes across twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Oh, I like the way you put that. We'll see
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. Let's hear it from one of
the best super producers in the game. Mister Max Williams
is mister Americ Max Boy. It's Max.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
That's facts.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
That's the song, that's what it was.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
That's also mister Noel Brown. They call me Ben Bullen.
We're here at the end of twenty twenty five where
versus the precipice?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Are we on the Precipice twenty six?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, we're recording on Thursday, December eighteenth, and at this
time of the year, you know what's since we're referencing songs,
you know, this is a time for reflection, looking back
play counting Crow's Long December.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I was gonna say, there is reason to believe that
maybe this year will be better than the last. It
is a reflect I didn't even put that together. It's
absolutely reflective song about the following year.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Ben.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
You did this episode research and I think it's actually
really helpful for this time of year, especially given you know,
conditions that maybe we can harken back to a time
that was, you know, unequivocally measurably worse than the time
we're currently living in.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
And also no.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Spoiler alert that we survived ah as a civilization.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Hey, there we go, folks, chin up, chest out, thanks
for joining us. It's the end of the year as
we know it, and we feel fine.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Have you seen them the most recent episode of Pluribus
been I have not, actually, so the cold open involves
the main character, Carol, singing in her car as she's driving,
trying to have a chin up attitude about the end
of the world, as is portrayed in that show more
or less, and she gets to the ni feel and
then it cuts off, and that's the cold open. I
(02:19):
just think it's such a clever Vince Gilligan little touch.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I love that guy. I love Vince, so we'll probably
meet him later on this show. We've noted this in
more somber moments, Nolan max that the world is ending
for someone somewhere at every second of every day. And
it's also true to your earlier point, Noel, that throughout history,
one group or another has inevitably claimed this year for real,
(02:47):
this tybet, guys, this year is the actual end of
the world is the worst year ever, it's a fall
of civilization, cats and dogs sleeping together, etc. We are
happy to report, folks to Know's earlier points that so
far throughout human history, all of those apocalyptic doomsday predictions
(03:08):
have been cartoonishly incorrect.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
And kats and dogs sleeping together a good thing, sort
of like the lion lying down with the lamb? Or
is that is that a bad sign?
Speaker 3 (03:16):
Cats and dog are a bad thing, which is sad
because if you go on YouTube you can find so
many great videos of cats and dogs.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
They're great.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Come this morning, So you're saying, once we start seeing
cats and dogs getting along, then the end is nigh. Yes, okay,
we're seeing keep an eye.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
That's what people had said, because they were They were
honestly being kind of dickish, a word I wouldn't usually use,
but on both Ridiculous History and our sister show Stuff,
they don't want you to know. We look at a
lot of those culty warnings. Please do check out our
previous episodes for more crazy stories of times people were
(03:55):
wrong about the end of the world.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
Oh yeah, they got it back where there's always some
caveat what what caused the little mix up and we'll
get it right the next time, and they never really do.
Just here we are, can either of y'all ever seen
in the wild someone carrying the end is nigh sign
on the that's the kind of thing you do see
like in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Where the Yeah, yeah, I think the stick is lazy.
I miss the old sandwich boards. Landwich boards.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, it's got a little
front and a back and potentially the individual is nude underneath.
You know, you never unless you can take a peek
from the side, which I would not advise.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah, we don't advise, uh side eyeing sandwich board.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Profits sandwich board crazies. Well, okay, one person's crazy is
another person's profits, Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
The next question, though, becomes okay, So first off, yes,
a lot of cult leaders will go and gather a
group of followers and say, yes, the world is ending
September seventeenth or December eighteenth, whatever, And then the date
comes to pass low and behold the world continues, and
they say, actually, we got the math a little wrong.
(05:10):
They'll usually kick it a few years in the future
or even a few months, and they'll say okay, no
for real this time, you guys, it's so January eighteenth totally.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
And you know who's been popping up a lot lately
in the pop culture. That Marshall apple White cat remember him? Oh,
I thought you were going to say the shamwell guy,
he's around, But that Marshall apple White, the bigt heead date, Ye,
Heaven's Gate, dude?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
That was that?
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Was that a doomsday cult technically because they were really
they wanted to get transported away by extraterrestrials. Yes, and
it was an event that was timed with a passage
of a comment, so there is a day and date
to that. But you could argue that it's not apocalyptic
per se, and well it did all die.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
They did think there was an apocalypse. The website is
still active because they left a couple of people behind.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
God, I bet it's GeoCities af right.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Our next question, though, despite all these weird incorrect predictions,
our next question is a little tougher to dismiss. This
is the focus of our exploration today, folks. Was there
ever a worst year in history? Logically, if you look
at all the years of human civilization, there has to
(06:25):
be one, right, There has to be one worst year ever,
and a lot of us in the audience tonight we're
probably gonna say for various reasons. Yeah, guys, this is
the worst year, just like we said in twenty twenty four,
just like we said in twenty twenty three, twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty one, that's gonna scale two, right, twenty twenty
(06:48):
twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I guess you got to kind of judge the president
based on the events of the past, and we're looking
a little farther back into the past for today's reference point.
But to what you're saying, Ben, I mean, it is
easy to get caught up in the moment, say, gosh,
this year suck that it suck for me personally because
I had maybe some job issues or some money problems,
or family issues, romantic issues, family tragedies, whatever it might be.
(07:14):
We're looking at it much more big picture than that,
and I think a lot of the things that people
are hung up on now are pretty big picture. And
we're not a political show. We're not going to get
into the nuts and bolts of that. But there are
certainly quite a large percentage of the population that are
feeling a certain way about the right now. So We're
going to take you back, back, back, back back to
(07:35):
a time that I think we can all agree, for
various reasons, was worse.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Yes. Yeah, maybe future historians will look back and say,
you know, twenty twenty five, twenty twenty four, twenty twenty
three is a worse year whatever, whatever, But as we
are going to see, as you so beautifully set up
in today's episode. No, some current historians, quite a few,
have already picked a winner for the worst year in
(08:03):
human history. Five thirty six CE, they argue, was the
worst year ever knew me, right, Yeah, okay, here we go.
So the year we call five thirty six CE or
d x x x v I if you're.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Nasty now, Ben, I would argue, it would be pronounced
D triple x v I if you were nasty, right,
or the.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Adults only if you're nasty so, or if.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
You're just down for some titillating erotic drama.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
There we are. It's this year is already fairly unique.
It happened a long time ago. It's a leap year
in the Julian calendar.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, we could pretend ill right, maybe not.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
I don't know why the Julian calendar.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
The lead dear man, you know how much of an
issue I have with leap year. I don't fel like
aple feast if we're in a leap year. It just
feels like there's an ill wind blow in and Maxis
is nodding his head.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
You got that.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
Let's let let's see. Let's see you guys remember what
the difference between the leap year and Julian And.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
It's ridiculous too. It's ridiculous so much so that we
did an episode about it.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I remember we did the episode. But it will never
be a thing that I'm able to internalize if.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
You don't do a leap year when leap year's you know,
obviously every four years, but you don't do it when
it's a when it is a one hundred, so like
fifteen hundred, seventeen hundred, unless it's divisible.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
By four hundred.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Yeah, so, and it's like, what are they doing here?
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It is a fact?
Speaker 1 (10:09):
So okay, at the time, people just called five p
thirty six CE the year after the consulship of Belisarius.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
That sounds cool. Let's go with that. We'll say it
every time of the I do love a good year
of our Lord, which I know can vary depending on
the lord and the year. So if we wanted to
connect the dots and talk a little bit about what
this thing is, the Belisarius in question is our boy.
Flavius one of my favorite Roman names. I don't know why.
(10:39):
It just makes me think he's got swagger. Flavius Belisarius. Dude,
this guy is a proper war hero. He does have swagger.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, he was a military commander. He was working for
the Byzantine Emperor at the time, Justinian the First. The
Western Roman Empire had already collapsed less than an undred
years prior. Belisarius plays a huge role in regaining a
lot of that territory for the Byzantine Empire.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Go did military cat right? Yeah seriously.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yeah. Even now modern war historians will say he's one
of the greatest of all time or goat as we mentioned.
So it's new surprise that for a little bit of
history he had a whole year named after him.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I'm okay with that. It seems earned did others do
it or did he do it? He he did it himself.
He was the thought leader on that way. He killed
a lot of people in the process, and they named
a year after him. I will still argue that he did.
He put the work in, you know, he put the
work in. Yeah, he did the reps for sure. You
(11:47):
don't see these plaques, what plaques, the plaques in the
White House talking about talking about writing your own story again,
try to be political. I just think it's funny. I
just think we're seeing some Roman empire megalem miniaco bay
here in writing your own plaques. Other people sposed to
write those plaques.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Man, Yeah, I don't love it as an apolitical point. Uh,
the the leadership of the United States should represent all Americans.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
It's true. And I just also somebody that I love
on YouTube the Internet today guys pointed out that whenever
I see a plaque, I expect for some real dignified
shit to be written, right, dignified.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Something like no shirt, no shoes, no service.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Also, well, you know what, I've never seen that engraved
into brass. But but a plastic plaque is still a plaque.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Oh we go to different gas stations.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Wow, okay, you go to the fancy boy gas way
up on the hill. Oh gosh, we'll fly golden commodes
in the Japanese toilet seats.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Oh geez, I wonder if there's golden the day, it
would be sick.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
If there were more bidezing gas stations, it would keep things.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Cleaner, hopefully. Yeah, on paper it would work.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
You real, they do have the days in every public
restroom is in the Middle East. Oh yeah, yeah, I
mean then they're like wands. They're they're handheld, they're on
the wall.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
That's what shower nozzles. Uh. Five thirty six was a
long time ago. We do know a couple of things
about that year. It's when the Chinese Empress Dowager lieh
It was born. Probably, It's when the Emperor of Japan
on Kon died. It's when Pope I Goepettas died. But
(13:29):
those deaths alone are not what inspire historians to call
five three six the worst year. To answer that, to
figure out why people hate this year so much, we
got a journey back and we got to look at
the weather. One day, the sky goes dark.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, we are talking about some of the End is
nine kind of business here. In AD five thirty six,
when a mysterious cloud appeared over the Mediterranean basin, Ben,
I've got to just really quickly. The mysterious cloud has
triggered me. You know the character Galactus in the Fantastic
four universe, who's like a godlike entity, an eater of planets.
(14:11):
Do you know how the Fantastic Four franchise has been
sort of plagued in its depiction in cinema, Like the
original one I think was in the nineties and it
was made by Roger Korman and it was famously shelved
for money because it was so bad. Then the second
one was also bad, with Michael Chickliss as the thing.
Then the third one I've heard recently referred to as
the one where Galactus is a cloud because it was
(14:32):
like just the era where like in the most recent
one where he's this giant, you know, monstrosity, this like
what do you call it, like lovecrafting and you know,
entity transformer type figure, they didn't have the they didn't
have the tech for that in two thousand and one,
so they just made him a cloud. They were darkening
sterious cloud.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, they were harkening back to the Ultimate Galactus. Ultimate
we're talking about part of Marvel Universe, which is a.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Little bit it's historically a dark cloud is an ill
omen yes, very.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Much so, and people were getting super creeped out by
this dark, ultimate galactus level cloud, especially folks like a
Byzantine historian who's often quoted here. His name is pro Copious,
and he wrote, the Sun gave forth its light without brightness,
and it seemed exceedingly like the Sun in eclipse, for
(15:29):
the beams it shed were not clear.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, the went a bit of a route to get there,
but I think it's like blotting out the sun. He
also wrote that it seemed like the Sun was constantly
from that point on it eclipsed, and that during this
time here's are his words, men were free, neither from war,
nor pestilence, nor any other thing leading to death. All
(15:53):
things that are not good ben descended upon the planet
and where haralded by this dark, mysterious cloud.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
Is crazy that there was not social media at the time.
People would have gone nuts on the internet if it existed.
This cloud. Yeah, this rules in and local climates are
cooling temperatures. In the summer of five point thirty six,
they fell several degrees celsius and this created the coldest
(16:22):
decade in the past two thousand, three hundred years. Snow
was falling in China in summer. In summer, there was
snow falling, crops were failing wide rife, as our pal
Frank would say.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
You would And are you saying the climate was changing.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
I'm saying the climate was chaotic.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
It was, But I'm just saying, like in what we
see today that is often described as climate change, not unusual,
not like historically without precedent, like the Ice Age, for example,
represented a massive hiccup in the climate. We're talking about here,
would be unseasonable in the climate brought on by at
the time, surely they knew.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Not what Yeah, and at an incredibly fast rate is
overnight kind of stuff, big ol'ponk. From five forty one
to five forty two. A pandemic follows on. It's called
(17:25):
the plague of Justinian. Guessing Justinian didn't make that one
up himself. That's just you know, he was in charge.
He gets saddled with the plague blame. Yeah, he's unlike
our war hero. He's in the meeting and he's yelling, you, guys,
I asked for a plaque, not a.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Plague, exactly, with some dignified ish, not one hundred percent
this thing that we're talking about, this cavalcade. This agglomeration,
as you'd say, been of bad stuff, absolutely ripped through
the Eastern Roman Empire and wiped out a third to
half of the entire population of that region. So, as
(18:02):
you can imagine, this led to some political turmoil. Yeah,
downright biblical.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
And at this point nobody knew what caused this. This
guy just went dim and dark, and most folks, if
you had a man on the street interview at this time,
they would say it's a punishment from their version of God.
They also did not have the privilege or the opportunity
to really investigate this horrific mystery because everybody was too
(18:33):
busy trying to stay alive, yeah, or just you know,
dying or die. Yeah. Yeah. Picture your ten favorite people,
five of them are gone. This is like, since we've
referenced Marvel films, this is like the Thanos snap, you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
The Thanos snap or the Bowlin pop. Yes, exactly, I
appreciate the Bullen pop. It would take centuries of later
research to figure out what happened and how this global
disaster came to be. Ever since the nineteen nineties, when
(19:10):
scientists looked at tree rings studies or Dendo chronology. They
found something interesting. They said, Wait, the summers around the
year five forty CE or AD, whatever your preference is,
we're unusually cold. What happened before we get to the.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Really dark, dangerous part here, folks, As we said at
the top, your safe humanity survived. Humanity went on to
invent all sorts of neat stuff like velcros, synthesizers, radio,
even podcasts.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Velcrow is just the best. Yeah, it's pretty, it's it's
a sticky wicked for sure. It makes a satisfying sound
when you separate the pieces.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Oh yeah, one for all our sensation of friends in
the crowd. Historians returned to this question of what made
five thirty six so specifically enormously cartoonishly bad, and they
started to crack some interesting theories. Noel, could we go
to the medieval historian Michael McCormick.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Man, we must. Michael McCormick is an authority on these matters,
and he had this to say, along with his pal,
a glaciologist named Paul Maiuski, and they're operating within an
organization called the Climate Change Institute of the University of Maine,
leading a team investigating all sorts of things, among them glaciers.
So we're talking about using glaciers to measure historical events.
(20:34):
Probably not exactly the same as like ice cores, but
you know, definitely there are things contained in glaciers that
are that represent events from the past, you know, various
compositions of minerals and chemicals and might whatever it might be.
So through an intense analysis of these ice it would
be ice cores from a glacier over in Switzerland, they
determined that the doomsday level events that swept Europe, Asia
(20:58):
and the Middle East, it was unavoidable and perhaps just
a taste of the awfulness to come timeline. I don't
know that we've gotten there yet, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
It's a real ristler coaster. Yeah, it's a real roller
coaster today. Like you said, inevitable, unstoppable, right, the all
pass have led you to me the answer to the
riddle of what made five thirty six just so bad?
Volcados not just one a combo move of multiple volcanic eruptions.
(21:34):
There was one that was believed to be properly in
Iceland maybe another way in North America that spewed ash
across the entirety of the northern hemisphere early in the
year of five thirty six, followed by two other massive eruptions,
one in five forty one in five forty seven. And
this team, they've got some great work published in a
(21:58):
journal called Antiquity. They say the repeated blows, followed on
by a plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted
well until six forty and then there was a spike
they could find red again. They're reading the ice the
way you would read rings in a tree. They say
(22:18):
there's a spike in airborne lead that marks the resurgence
of silver mining. So Nola first. Our next question becomes
what makes these eruptions so dangerous? And maybe to answer that,
we get to lean on our house stuff works hats.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yes, because they are quite sturdy, those how stuff works hats,
so we can lean right on them. When a volcano erups,
its spew sulfur something called bismuth, which sounds like a
material you might find in the pits of Hell and
other substances, way way up into the atmosphere, where they
become aerosolized and form like a kind of bubble, a veil,
(22:55):
as it's often referred to. That can reflect the Sun's
light back out into space, cooling the planet, which you know,
when you said cooling, that sounds like relatively monocuous, but
we're talking extreme levels of cooling.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great point about
cooling sounding way less catastrophic than it is. These guys
were able to match the ice record of those chemical
traces you know in this ice core with tree bring
records of climate. And this is where we go to
a guy named Michael Siggle who was at the University
(23:32):
of Berne for a long time, and they found something predictive.
They said, look every pretty much every unusually cold summer
over the past two thousand and five hundred years was
directly preceded by a volcanic eruption. That's what inspired Mayeuski
and McCormick. In twenty thirteen, Biyuski's team took this seventy
(23:55):
two meter long ice core from the Swiss Alps and
they used in ultra high resolution method to what's the
best way to say this, we're not experts. They took
a laser that could carve very tiny slices of ice,
and with that they were able to say, look at this,
(24:18):
at this period of time for just a few days
or a few weeks there was snowfall right or they
could tell the weather with that level of sophistication, accuracy
and fidelity, and it was a frightening time capsule. You know,
they saw two thousand years fall out from volcanoes, Saharan
dust storms, human activity, and it's right there in the
(24:40):
center of Europe. This is nuts, man, They were watching
an action movie montage.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, just like really slowly, like the paint drying version
of an action movie montage. But we're glad that there
are smarter people than us that can do the work
there with the ice cores and all of this analysis
that takes a lot of discipline, into detail and patience.
So each of these samples, some fifty thousand from each
(25:06):
meter of the core, were analyzed for about a dozen
different elements of you know, checking to see where they
fell in the timeline that you can you know, kind
of put put together from analyzing these ice cores. The
approach enabled the team to pinpoint specific storms, specific volcanic eruptions,
and lead pollution down to the month with absolute precision,
(25:30):
or at least really really close to being right on
the money within a month or possibly even less within weeks,
so more research was to follow.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, here's what we found. It seems that the wind
and weather systems back then in five thirty six must
have been just right, just perfect for an apocalypse. It
guided the plume of this volcanic eruption southeast across Europe
later into Asia, and this vulcan canic fog rolled across
(26:02):
the land. There was, to be fair, there was nothing
civilization could have done to prevent this, and if something
like this happened today, there is little that modern civilization
could do to stop it. We're we're basically four volcanoes
away from the end of the world, for sure.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
And I guess we think of things we could do
as a society, as a civilation civilization to prevent these
kinds of things. I think the mind often jumps to
conservation efforts, and you know, reducing pollution and closing the
hole in the ozone layers of This is beyond any
of that, Yeah, right, Ben, This is not man made
or contributed to by any activity of human beings.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
Yeah, this is past the pay grade of the Homo
sapien for sure. We don't want to lose hope, you know,
we want, we want to dream big. It's a long
December for everyone. There's a meason to believe, there's a
reason to believe there's something new and on the horizon, hopefully.
Five point thirty six was certainly unusual, It was certainly tough.
(27:05):
It led to a terrifying decade of chaos, but humanity
soldiered on. And the same research that taught humans about
volcanic eruptions also gives insight into how and when civilization recovered,
because the same ice that tells the story of disaster
tells the story of humanity getting back on its feet.
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Well, I think we all love a good comeback story.
I mean, obviously, you know, with the atomic bombs dropped
on Japan, it was an absolute horrific event that's annihilated
most aspects of that civilization. But we also know that
the recovery and the rebuilding of Japan led to insane
advances and led to them being like top of the
(27:49):
heap in terms of technology and innovation and culture. And
you know, I just I love a rebuilding story rising
from the ashes. So we have that here, of course.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
Yeah, yeah, let's go to Kyle Harper, a medieval and
Roman historian at the University of Oklahoma. He says, if
you look through these ice cores, you have a new
kind of record for understanding one of the most beautiful
words here, understanding the concatenation of human and natural causes
(28:22):
that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. And
Kyle says, if we could be familiar with you here,
Kyle Kyle says, this also shows us the earliest stirrings
of a new medieval economy. There was a spike. It
led in six point forty. There's another great name we
got to bring up here in an archaeologist called Christopher
(28:45):
love Luck. What a cool last day.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Sounds like a Harry Potter character, Very very cool. But
this also is connected to a story that we talked about,
I believe it was this year on our sister pod.
Something I want you to know when we do our
strange news segments about newer analysis of these lead levels
showing that lead contamination led to cognitive decline in the
(29:09):
Roman Empire. That's not the same thing we're talking about here.
We're talking about things well beyond the realms of intellect.
But we could also argue that what led to a
decline in their powers was also brought on by lead levels.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Oh yeah, yeah, making them dumber. Yes, yeah, yeah yeah.
Check out our upcoming stuff they'll want you to know
episode about the proposed connection between lead levels and serial killers. Again,
like you were saying, Noel, a little bit outside the
scope of this episode, but we're always going to be closing.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
And we're looking at the lead levels here as a
positive because it represents new industry that was emerging.
Speaker 4 (29:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Our buddy Christopher Loveluck over at the University of Nottingham
points out that these led levels are smoking gun evidence
of mining. So silver is smelted from this lead or
the lead is a sign that silver is back in business,
Silver is back in demand. The economy is rebounding from
(30:15):
these volcanic eruptions. You see another lead peak in six
point sixty. This means there was a ton of silver
going into the medieval economy, and it suggests that gold
became increasingly scarce because more people were trading, so you
had to move to silver. In essence, we don't have
(30:38):
any more Coca cola. Would you take a pepsi?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
No, I'd rather start, I'd rather die thirst. You're not
a pepsi guy, not onlike pepsi, not on like pepsi. No,
it insists upon itself, it really does. It's just it's
very syrapy. It's not my thing. And it also could
well be just where we live and the loyalty I
think we all have for the cocup.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
In here and say, I don't really feel much loyalty
to coke.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Now, I think.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
That's what I'm saying. It's it's like I don't really
even drink so that much. I don't really feel that
much loyalty to coke. And I think coke is vastly
spirit of pepsi. It's just it. It does. It insists
upon itself. It is the hata odyssey of sodas.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Oh yo, you got me back. That was a roller
coaster commet. You're manipulating me so well.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
You know else kind of insists upon themselves. The upper
middle class.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Ah, yes, yeah, I lovel merge.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
We don't we with that merchant class?
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, love Luck argues this is the Rise of the
Merchant Class.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Which is the most boring Marvel movie title of all.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Time, The Rise of the Merchant Class. I love, I
love ten minutes of it. I don't know if I
love two hours of it.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah, I don't need it.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Just give me a YouTube review, right for sure.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
That's how we do our recent But there was a
cool YouTube you linked to Ben in this research from
Weird History, which is a great channel. In the videos
called year five thirty six was the worst year to
be alive? What happened? Right?
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah? In that video, which cites some of the research
we're citing here as well. We ultimately conclude the ice
has a lot to say for those who know how
to listen, and it shows us another Just following the
lead patterns is so weird because it shows us another
tough time in history. Lead vanishes again during the Black
(32:39):
Death from thirteen forty nine to.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Thirteen to fifty three. You know, you got to weigh
out a little bit. You gotta got lead or we
got the Black Death, right right, one or the other.
I said, a plaque, not a plague. It would be
insult to injury if we had both, is all I'm
getting it, you know. Yeah, rising lead levels and the
Black Death that would be just too much. But yeah,
black Death, I'm not meaning to make light. That was
(33:03):
another gnarly historical wiper outer of populations.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Yeah, it was not a great day for most people.
But this so we've solved the case, right, the boffins
have figured out that five point thirty six became a
terrible year that launched a thousand ships of disaster because
of volcanic eruptions. But is it the worst year ever?
Is it alarmist or a hyperbolic to call it that?
(33:29):
Maybe a little?
Speaker 2 (33:30):
I mean, the worst anything ever is in its very
nature hyperbolic. That is what that is.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Yeah, yeah, things.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
Could always get worse. We also don't, well, I guess
we are talking about things that have happened. So if
you did the math, there's probably some arguments that could
be made that you could unequivocally rank it as s
tier worse year.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
Jbe what of right, definitely one of the worst years.
It reminds me a little bit of that poem by W.
H Auden about the Old Masters. In the poem, he's
talking about this painting where Icarus is falling from the
sky because he got.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Too close to the sun.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, and the biggest, the twist of it, to spoil
this poem is that there's also a boat in the painting,
and the people on the boat do not care that
Icarus is falling. Their life is fine. So there are
populations in other parts of the world that don't know
five thirty six is the worst year ever because they
(34:33):
don't even have the calendar that tells them it's five
thirty six.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
It's a good point.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
They're just alive. And they might hear a traveler from
Afar who's who's like, hey, I'm from what we call
the world it's Western Europe spoiler, and everything's terrible there,
and they're like, hey man, we're fine, you know, welcome
to Botswana.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Well, you know, in theory, we are fine. If you've
ask forward to this year being on the cusp of
twenty twenty six, we are still sitting here in twenty
twenty five. Humanity has you know, persevered as we are
wont to do. Broken a lot of eggs in the
process of making that what is it? Civilizational omelet?
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Nailed it, nailed it ten ten no notes. I like it.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
I made an omelet this morning. It's on my mind.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
You did you make an omelet on a work day?
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I make an omelet in the morning. Yeah, I'm working
from home. I cook a nice little breakfast, made some
bacon and an omelet.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
That's coffel.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Yeah, I like fun. So we you make an omelet
on a workday that allowed on the weekend. That's crazy, man,
too hard, cool night, Nolan.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Nolan and I are friends because we have vastly different
religions and philosophy, and we have vastly different morning routine. Right,
Why do I sound scandalized?
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It was funny. I have to question it, but I'm
here for it, man. And then a workday not help
you if you put any garlic in it?
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Oh my gosh. I have so many questions that we
have to save for off air. And I love I
love getting to know you.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Oh so we're here for Yeah, podcasting is all about
but we're we're here making omelets literal and figurative. We
do still have some issues. Was the climate does seem
to be approaching levels of unpredictability that we've described in
this aforementioned worst year ever. Experts cross the planet are
proposing some pretty wild solutions as well. We remember that
(36:37):
guy we talked about this recently on Stuff that I
want you to know, who like he was just a guy.
He wasn't even like had no authority or was an
expert really, but he suggested like detonating an atomic beyonderground,
and that it would have some crazy effect of like
reducing pollution or I don't remember exactly, but I just
do remember that there was some there were some experts
saying it's crazy, but it just might work.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeahs, nuclear weaponry, NU clear technology is the shiny new
toy right up there with large language models are so
called artificial intelligence. So logically, a lot of people said,
I don't know, man, maybe we nuke stuff, Maybe we can.
Maybe nukes are the solution to all those problems we
(37:16):
created and cannot solve. But in that spirit, Noel. One
of the most well researched outlandish solutions is something we
talked about in a recent episode of Stuff They will want,
you know, Stratospheric aerosol injection or SAI. The ideas you
can just wish wish a lot of solid particle aerosols
(37:38):
into Earth's stratosphere and then that can help mitigate global warming.
That we're talking a fleet of airplanes, six thousand flights
every day, thirty eight million metric tons of sulfur dioxide
or similar stuff. Basically, the proposal is to artify create
(38:01):
conditions similar to five thirty.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Six c Can I just backcheck one split second, because
I think people are wondering. The dude I was talking
about was a twenty five year old Microsoft software engineer,
so an expert in something but not a climate change,
and he proposed, yeah, a precision detonation of a nuclear
bomb under the ocean that would quote, according to NDTV
(38:24):
dot com, viscerate the carbon absorbing rocks that make up
the seabed and causing rapid rock weathering at a scale
substantial enough to make a meaningful dent and atmospheric carbon levels.
It was also published in a non peer reviewed website,
not even a journal, a website. Just sorry, I just
I was reminded of this, this crazy idea, among many
(38:48):
other crazy ideas to do something about you know, what's
going on with the climate.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
So what we're telling you here, folks, is essentially that
people are attempting to artificially create a vault canic winter
like back in the halcyon days of five thirty six CE.
What do you think, pretty good year? Is it time
to roll the dice? Should we bring back five thirty six?
(39:14):
Just talk about retro? Right? Should we bring back five
thirty six? Well, we will talk about that and more
much more in the future as we're bringing in twenty
twenty six. Thank you as always for joining us on
our mad continuing adventures to boldly go into the most
(39:36):
ridiculous of history.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Are we mad cap? Ben?
Speaker 1 (39:40):
I think so?
Speaker 2 (39:41):
Would we qualify?
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (39:43):
We call these mad cap adventures. We can we even
go so far as to call them capers. Perhaps I
love a caper. Yeah, I love a heist.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, it's gonna start it on a heist, and even
a caper just on a bagel. You know, I'm done.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
You love a caper? I love a caper. It's a
delightful little what do you call like a bubble of flavor,
almost like a fish egg.
Speaker 1 (40:01):
Yeah, there we go. That's a good comparison. We also
love you folks for supporting our little show and tuning
in with us. Give us a review.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
Yeah, it all means, give us an end of the year,
give us the gift of a nice review, a little
at a boy, you know, help the sleep there it is.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
And we also want to give a big shout out
to our super producer, mister Max Williams, who cuts a
clever figure in a suit.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
We just cuts a real nice figure and he cuts
a mean podcast. Yeah, he also cuts. He'll cut you
if you look at him.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Funny, Oh, behave and big thanks to our composer Alex Williams.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
We're going to yoga together tonight, me and Alex. Oh,
we're doing a yoga m and ages. I'm looking forward.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
That's awesome. We also want to note that Jonathan Strickland
ak the Quister, did not show up to our holiday party.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
You know what. He didn't. But he's also allergic to
alcohol and shellfish, and both of those things were on
offer at this event, So he may well have died.
Perhaps perhaps he may well have choked him, chook the
life right out of him.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Well, he's contractually obligated to come back from the dead
and appear appear on Ridiculous History, so stay tuned for that.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
A ghost of Christmas future. Who do you think which
ghost would would would would he be? Or is he
just the scrooge of it all? He's the scrooge and
he likes that main character energy I want to be.
Whichever ghost was played by the guy from the New
York Dolls who drives the cab the blackout teeth.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Yeah, yeah, we mentioned him previously as well. He's probably
one of my favorites too. We also have more people
to thank. Eve's jeffco christa vassiotis here in spirit. Yeah,
here in Christmas spirit. Nice one. What else should we, guys?
Should we just be the volcano that.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
We what you want to be? The volcano you wish
to see in the world. Yeah, which is hopefully not
that many active ones anymore. Well, there are three, there
are four of us. There's the three of us recording,
there's you joining us at home. So between four volcanoes,
we can the world. We can out the sun.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yes, believe in yourself. There we go. That's a show.
Tune in, uh, tune in later this week. We're gonna
get to some stuff we didn't get to in previous
episodes across twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Oh, I like the way you put that. We'll see
you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina are here and have everyone talking. iHeartPodcasts is buzzing with content in honor of the XXV Winter Olympics We’re bringing you episodes from a variety of iHeartPodcast shows to help you keep up with the action. Follow Milan Cortina Winter Olympics so you don’t miss any coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, and if you like what you hear, be sure to follow each Podcast in the feed for more great content from iHeartPodcasts.