Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - The Great Smog

Episode Date: February 2, 2021

As with almost every cultural touchstone, Dr. Sydnee and Justin are extremely late to The Crown party. But the Netflix historical drama has provided not only immovable hairdos and withering glares, it also serves as the inspiration of our latest episode, in which a freak weather pattern (and an overuse of fossil fuels) nearly suffocated a city.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a metal tour of misguided medicine for the mouth. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones, a marital tour of

misguided medicine. I'm your co-host Justin McRoy. And I'm Sydney McRoy. Well, it is the season and by wish I mean 12 to 18 month period. We're watching TV is really important. It's really a keystone of our cultural development as a people. I like Justin and I tend to continue this trend

of watching a program long after everyone else has already either watched the entire thing or at least a good portion of it and asserted multiple times that it is an excellent show. We just kind of sit back and wait until finally we want to hear the show's wrapping up. We want to hear that it all worked out okay. Is that something to brag about?

I'm a late adopter. I'm a late adopter with TV. I want to know how it all shakes out. Shits Creek didn't pick it up until after the show was over. And then we loved it. But then we loved it. And there's other shows like that. Like the crown.

Like the crown. We're late to the crown. That's what we're going. So we are late to the crown. We're still early. And then it's only because in our defense. In the episodes. In our defense, it looks extremely boring.

I mean, in our defense, it looked like a boring show for boring people. No, I don't say that. Everybody liked it. Yeah, everybody liked it. But also as an outside observer, it looks extremely a boring show for boring people. No, I don't say that. Everybody liked it. Yeah, everybody liked it, but also as an outside observer, it was extremely boring, didn't it? It's just, you see the pictures. There's not one where the Queen Elizabeth

is like holding a sword or, you know what I mean? Well, I don't know that that would make it more exciting for me, but I think I kind of thought, well, I already watched Downton Abbey, so. It's like that except you know Hanans, except in our case, you definitely don't. And that is drawing. We don't know anything about the history of the British monarchy.

No thing. It's bad. We quiz each other sometimes like, quick quiz said, how many kids do they have? And Cindy's like, well, Charles, and there's a little girl on screen I guess. I'm like six, four, five, harmony kids. I mean, no Prince Philip, I didn't know Prince Philip was married to the Queen.

Well, I knew that. You knew that. I didn't know that. She's married. Good for her. The titles make things confusing. If you are a listener in the UK, then you knew all this. I think we're idiots.

Yes. And that's just not, I mean, to be fair, in my history courses that I took, nobody really focused on the history of the British monarchy. And I've just never been smitten with, I don't know. I know. Well, I've never had that thing either. I, of course, because I am a person of a certain age had an infatuation with the prince's William and Harry when I was younger.

So I can't, but I'm as past it. So I don't know, but we're watching the crown and it sparked our interest in this episode, which is about the great smog or fog, but really smog of London. I did not know about this. I think I've heard the phrase great fog of London. Although everywhere I looked, it was great smog of London, even though they were, anyway, I've heard that phrase and just thought it was cause it's foggy there.

I didn't know it was a thing. You look outside, you look at the fog, you think, oh, that's great. It's just really fog. I didn't know that was an event in history. I didn't know there was a specific time. I also didn't know the medical implications, and I didn't know that it was a big bad thing. I mean, it makes total sense,

but I didn't know it until we watched the episode. So I wanted to dig in deeper. Again, you may already know all about this. Although what I've learned from researching it is that this wasn't the topic of tons of books about, you like detailing events until really recent history. When people started looking to read more about it and learn more about it and went,

oh, there's not a ton written about it. And luckily, there were still people alive who had actually lived through those events who could talk about it and be interviewed and they could create a history of it. But it wasn't something that was hugely spoken about necessarily. So in short, in 1952, the worst air pollution event in the history of the UK happened.

And though, I think one of the weird things to keep in mind during this is that people really didn't panic much. I would say in the episode of the Crown we watched, there was some panicking. Even that sounds like a bit of an exaggeration. Really? Yes. I guess in part it was the whole thing.

My understanding is that British people are very good at keeping a stiff upper lip Yes, I've heard this and perhaps it was that perhaps it was that the that World War two was not that long ago at this point And they had already been through a lot and so in addition, there were a lot of fogs in London a lot of fog were a lot of uh... fogs in london a lot of fogs a lot of smogs this was not necessarily a new and lots of frogs more than you i don't know there's probably a average number of normal amount of frogs despite the fact that around at the time they knew this around four thousand people did die

from this event and that but that's what they knew at the time and later estimates have suggested that it may be closer to 10 to 12,000 deaths that could be attributed to that. It's not immediately occurring in that in this short time period, but that occurred as a result of this event. What? Okay. What happened?

So first of all, it's important to know that a lot of people in London were burning coal at this time. It So the heartbeat of America as West Virginia is we really can't say enough great stuff about this beautiful black rock. You know, if you squeeze it hard enough and long enough, it turns into a dime. Yeah. Now, I'm going to say on a side note, my relationship with coal, I have lived in West Virginia pretty much on my life, but I did do a science fair project that won based on the dangers of acid mind drainage

to our environment and what's poor job, our coal companies were doing in reclaiming this land and how much damage to the environment. Anyway. The only argument ever in our marriage, I'm like, that's justice for the world of coal. I just have a whole throw the whole of a whole. Never heard anybody. But I've always feel like this is an important anecdote.

If you want to understand my relationship with the rest of the world, it's to continuously bother people to create trouble. You're heard of raining on people's braids. Sinny does it literally. I literally do it. It gets can't praise canceled. Okay, so no shade. We live in West Virginia, but there was a lot of coal burning happening. And

there were a lot of energy plants that were located like in the city. I mean, like when you burn fossil fuels, I think we all know it creates a lot of smoke and air pollution. I hope everybody knows that. It does. If you didn't know it. There were like diesel-powered buses. I guess there had been like an electric tram kind of system before that, and then that wasn't being used in favor of diesel. There were steam locomotives. All this stuff created pollution. So there was already pollution, and that's not unique to London, right? There's pollution everywhere, most major cities, and even in parts of the

world where there isn't a major city like here, the air is not great quality. So this is a problem in many places. But in London, it was a particular bad problem at this moment in history, because it was crowded, and there were tons of people burning fossil fuels. Also, because they had actually used a lot of the high quality coal

to pay off war debts from World War II, the coal that was being burned was a particularly, I guess, like, bad kind of coal that had high, high sulfur content. This added to the deadly pollution that was in the air. Now, I don't know how to say's bad coal, but I will take your We don't have that here in West Virginia Good stuff And the weather had been colder than usual so everybody was burning more coal than usual because it had been so cold All this pollution already made for smog and they would have what they called P supers

Which they said that in the episode. It's a real pea super today, I believe. And it was called a pea super because in the air, along with the sulfur dioxide that was filling the air in the carbon dioxide, and all the other pollutants, there was like tar, tari substances from like the automobile pollution, everything in the air. And so it would give like the smog a blackish yellowish kind of appearance, but it smelled awful, by the way. Of course. I can't imagine all that sulfur. I bet you would smell like pea soup. So they would call it pea soup because that was the way it kind of looked. Like you were walking through pea soup, except you're inhaling it into your lungs. And not drinking it into your body.

No, I don't even know if pea soup is good, I've never had it. But if this smog is not good for you, this was bad, but on December 5th of 1952, all of this was made way worse by an anti-cyclon. Did you know I had to do a lot of meteorological research for this? It sounds fake. No, it's real.

I assumed it's an old timey name for a real thing. You know what I mean? They didn't come up with a word hurricane yet, so they called it an anti-cyclone because they're like, I don't know what it is. You know there are cyclones. There are also anti-cyclones. Cyclones are... Cyclones are supposed to be not having a cyclone.

I learned so much, so I read so much about whether cyclones are responsible for like warm air from the equatorial regions of the planet making it to the poles without cyclones, without this, like revolving the air patterns in the fronts and the movement of air that these cause. We would have like really hot temperatures at the equator and like super cold of the poles and that would never change. You get all these gradients of temperature and changes in temperature. You're actually learning about another kind of stuff on this show. A cyclone is a low pressure system and it forms when cold and warm bodies of air fronts

meet. And then they start to like wave and then they turn. And a cyclone turns counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern. And they can really dramatically change weather patterns as a cyclone moves through an area, right? An anti-cyclone is the opposite, as you would imagine, anti. It is a high pressure system.

It can form in like the wake of a cyclone after it's moved through an area. And it turns the opposite direction for each hemisphere. So basically if a cyclone turns counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, an anti cyclone turns clockwise and vice versa for the southern hemisphere. The winds are slower moving. In the summer, an anti-cyclone can lead to like calm weather, kind of a calm, windless, beautiful summer day, you can imagine, could happen in an anti-cyclone. In the winter, it can be very different, especially if you have an area where it's been colder than usual, and so like the ground is colder than usual. Right. Which we've established, it's cold. If it is cold enough to reach the dew point,

then you can have a fog form, right? And then at that point, you've got this layer of cold air and then fog in some cases, which is trapped under kind of a bubble of warm air on top of it. Okay. Okay. Okay. And if you add air pollution to this whole, you know, mil you, then you get smog. Okay.

Because you have cold air, fog, and now smog trapped in an area underneath all this warm air on top. And it is kind of just sitting there. And especially in the center of the anti-cyclon, it's really stagnant. It just no breeze, no wind, just sits there, doesn't move. And because anti-cyclon's moves so slowly in general, they can just post up somewhere for a matter of days.

And keep the air gross basically. Yes. An anti-psychlon sits over Los Angeles frequently. Ah, then they've had a lot of air quality issues. Small issues as well. Yes, so I think you can see if you're familiar with LA, this is the same thing that is happening in London at this point. And an anti-psychlon visits London pretty much every year.

Like this is not a rare occurrence that an anti-psychlon visits London pretty much every year. Like this is not a rare occurrence that an anti-cyclon would settle in over the city. That happens. That's just a weather pattern. That's not weird. But at this point, when you have all this pollution and all this coal burning, and it all gets trapped in London

underneath this anti-cyclon, that is why you have this, this event, which is rare. The severity of this event is rare. There's usually not much precipitation, by the way. It's usually like the warm, the warm drier up top prevents that. So it's just this stagnant, not moving air, and it sits there until basically it moves on

and the weather gets better, right? So one of these anti-psychloans plops down on London December 5th of 1952 and then we get the great smog trapped there and everyone inside the city, everybody in this anti-psychleon just has to breathe in the pollution until it shifts basically. Yeah, I mean, and they say that it's funny. And the episode they talk about how like, you can't, what are you gonna do? It's a weather.

You can't fix the weather. There were lots of things they could have done ahead of time. But once it's there, I would say, yeah, I mean, you could stop creating more pollution. Yeah. Because you see people still like burning coal and driving the buses and all this stuff. And that's just more, I mean, you're just adding to it

because that's not gonna go anywhere. It's not gonna dissipate. It was so thick, you essentially felt like you couldn't see it all. I mean, like you couldn't see your feet in front of you as you walked. People who talk about the time period, talk about how you had to shuffle around. So you didn't like walk into something? You couldn't see curbs, you couldn't see fire hydrants,

you couldn't see lamp posts, you couldn't see fire hydrants, you couldn't see lamp posts, you couldn't see people, you couldn't see anything. The lights in the city were all incandescent bulbs and those don't penetrate fog or smog. So they didn't have the big fluorescent like fog penetrating lights. So like you couldn't see anything. It was getting dark super early, right?

The sudden episode that it would get dark like 2 p.m. or something. Yeah, well, because it was just, I mean, you were just trapped in this thick, I mean, I can't even imagine. People who, if you look at pictures of the time and everybody by the way, I think it's interesting the way that the city told people to deal with it, other than that a lot of stuff got shut down. Even like the smog creeped into like in buildings and stuff. There were like shows that were canceled and things because the theater would be full of smog. Like it got inside.

Now all the rock concerts, like if they had Striper playing or something like that, that just made it more awesome. Like don't you worry about our old-timey fog machines? It's like in-bill basically. Sure, sure. Except, except you're just coughing the whole time. People were, I think this is interesting. People were told.

You know what, can I take kind of a bridge diversion? I was trying to do a poll on a hard rock band and I came up with Striper, which is basically the only Christian heavy metal band and someone will thinks that they're roasting me for it in their head, so I want to be you to the punch and say that's extremely lame. And I'm sorry, go striper, striper rolls.

I'm not familiar with their work. It's with a while, so that's probably the confusion. So one thing I want to say that I think it's interesting in comparing this to where we are in the world today. Can't wait briefly, can I just show you a picture of Stryper? Oh, wow. That's a look. You may know there are a lot of people in black

to hell with the devil. Okay, sorry. Anyway, the thing that I think is interesting is that one thing the government did tell you to do to cope with it is wear a mask. And so you'll see pictures, you can find pictures of people in London at this time where they're like wearing masks or scarves

or bandanas around their face, which looks very appropriate now, it seems very, it actually did not work for that. As much as masks are helpful in our current world event, in this world event, the mask probably weren't doing anything. It was too late, but they didn't have anything else to tell people to do, so they told them to do that. Now, as you can imagine, there were health effects. And I'm going to tell you about the health effects. Right after we go to the billing department. Let's go. Hey there, beautiful people. Did you hear that good, good news? Something about the baby Jesus?

He's coming back! Or do you mean the fact that Apple Podcasts named Santai? What are the best shows of 2020? I mean we already knew that we was hot stuff but a little extra to validation never hurts, okay? Hosted by me, writer and journalist Jared Hill and me, the Ebony and Trencher Scythal, Jervel Anderson.

Fantai is your home for complex conversations about the great areas in our lives, the people, places and thanks. We're huge fans of but got some anti-feeling stored. You name it, we Fantai, Nobody's off limits. Check us out every Thursday on MaximumFun.org, or wherever you get your slayworthy audio. Alright, so I've been promised some discussion of health effects.

Okay, so... Not that I haven't loved meteorology. That's what we've done this hot once for, but... Well, I think it's interesting to understand why this happened. And why this is kind of a perfect storm, so to speak. Says if you don't, if you do, if you do say something. I'm not really a storm, but you know what I mean. So, okay, the hospitals were definitely strapped by this,

right, and they had to be. I mean, everybody's inhaling toxic air pollutants constantly. There were definitely people dying. But what's weird is that there wasn't, like I said, there was no panic. In the episode we watched, they sort of depicted like a lot of running and screaming. There really wasn't a lot of that.

I'm sure that there were people who were very upset and scared, especially people who were losing loved ones, but there wasn't like a central database to keep track of how many people were dying. So one hospital didn't necessarily know what another hospital was going through. There weren't big headlines about the death toll. There were headlines that there was a smog,

but nobody was saying, and also the hospitals are filling up and people are dying. A lot of people felt like, I mean, it's just the smog. Like, that's what happens. This happens all the time. It's a pea soup or it's a really bad one. No big deal. They also kind of felt like, this is an act of God.

What do we do? I mean, this just happens. Some people felt like this is just the price you pay for living in a city. We live in the busiest city on earth. And sometimes, you gotta breathe a little little smoke. Sometimes you can't see your feet when you're walking because the smog is so thick. And this is just, you know, this is just what happens. But you got the

best pizza in the world. It's before New York was amended greatly. There's a it's funny. There's also at the same time, I guess, there was also a serial killer in London that was making headlines. Great timing. You wonder though, did they wait until they're like, wait a minute, look outside. I've been wanting to serial kill for so long, and I feel like this is the moment.

It's so like, I got into woodworking because of the pandemic. I bet that serial killer was like, this is perfect. No one could see anything. It's really, I bet that serial code was like, this is perfect. No one could see anything. It's really, I found as I was researching this, I stumbled across this book that I have ordered, I haven't read yet, but it's called Death in the Air

by Kate Winkler Dawson. And it is about the kind of overlapping occurrences of this London smog happening at the same time that there was a serial killer who was strangling people. So, it's fixating people who were also being fixated. I know it was added to the total. No. And both resulted, I'm not going to get into the serial killer storyline, but that also resulted

in a pebble of sort of the order and outcry. He's been. He's been had the show in meteorological meteorological meteorological meteorological weather science and you can't get in those here. Are you going to storyline? Corn's it. I guess it was a thought that as an offshoot of this someone was thought to have maybe

been falsely accused although maybe they weren't. It's not really clear and who was actually put to death for this. And then the other guy confessed later and so then there was this public outcry about the death penalty as a result. I sure did. So like there's this whole other tangent that you could go off on. I don't know. I don't know. My favorite murder episode about it.

Yes. Uh, but all of this stuff was happening. And so there weren't, there weren't a lot of people like demanding that the government do something or like saying like, maybe we should get on this air quality thing. Maybe there's a problem with the air quality. The causes of death were largely, as you may imagine, respiratory issues, the very young, the very old,

and those with underlying lung disease were the most at risk. A lot of infection in the lungs resulted from the inflammation from inhaling all this stuff. And so people were dying at the time. They would say like they had pneumonia, they had bronchonemonia, they had all these different names that they had for inflammation and then infection in the lungs. They would say their lungs were filled with pus. They had pneumonia.

There were a lot of deaths that followed the days after the smog would eventually dissipate that they tried to blame on like influence uh... they're like well as flu season is probably just flew but that was probably in retrospect that was likely not the case well there was flew but that was probably not what this was one component of the pollution as i said was sulfur dioxide and you inhale sulfur dioxide like any anytime you snuff out of match, right? And a little bit of it is not necessarily dangerous, like when you snuff out of match.

And you smell it by the way long before it re- like the level it needs to be in the air for you to smell it is way, way, way, way lower than the level it needs to be to harm you. Which is why you smell it. It's not necessarily quite the way it is. Exactly. But that was one big component because of things like cold beam, beam burned. And when you inhale, sulfur dioxide, it interacts with any kind of moisture. So all of your mucus membranes, the ones that line your respiratory tract inside your mouth and side your nose, all that area, it, right? Right. There's moisture there.

And that forms sulfurous acid. And this is an irritant. This is not good. You don't want that in your airways. It also, because it's an irritant, will cause your airways to react, to constrict, right, to tighten, to get smaller. In people with asthma, a much smaller amount of this can do this. With enough of it, even if you don't have any respiratory problems, it can cause your

airway to constrict. Basically, the worser lungs already are the harder this is going to be on you. Exactly. And the more you're exposed to, the more likely you are to essentially asphyxiate eventually. In enough concentration in a poorly ventilated enclosed area, as some people may have been living in or just being outside in this. It can irritate your skin, it can irritate your eyes, it can cause nausea and vomiting. All of these things were probably happening.

The respiratory irritations symptoms will start with like sneezing, sore throat, weezing, shortness of breath, your chest will feel tight, you'll feel like you're suffocating. But eventually they'll go on to, like I said, tightening of the airways like bronchospasm, pneumonitis, which is inflammation of the lungs, fluid accumulating in the lungs, like pulmonary edema. And you can get all of these things can lead to, obviously, you dying

of these acute lung conditions and all this inflammation in your lung leaves you open for infection, which you could, at the time, have also very easily have died from when we were just starting to introduce antibiotics into the world and not regularly use them for these types of things. Long-term exposure to this kind of thing, which you have to imagine was happening even outside of this event, can cause an increase susceptibility to infections. So you're more likely to get future lung problems

because you've been breathing this in, chronic bronchitis. You can lose your sense of smell. Yeah. So how do you even know this? Well, good thing it's, it's, it's, be super colored. And of course, all this stuff would have been worse for children, especially not maybe not in the acute sense, but if you're talking about long term outside of just this one

meteorological air pollution ecological event, kids were breathing this stuff in all the time. Not just in London, but anywhere where they were burning a lot of fossil fuels in closely, like densely populated areas. What's interesting is so the smog would lift right on the ninth, I believe, But even after it lifted and the weather cleared and people could see and they went back to their lives, there still wasn't a big outcry. There still wasn't a big panic. It would be seven months for the government to actually do an official inquiry into the event to see like, did we do something that maybe caused this or maybe was there something we could have done that would have prevented it?

And it was finally then that wasn't really a panic, but it was the realization of reports that would come out in 1953 in the years to follow about air quality and the dangers of burning fossil fuels and things like the great smog. All of that would lead to essentially the first clean air act anywhere was passed in the UK in 1956. And it was indirectly, directly, I mean, as a result of this one terrible event of air pollution.

I imagine once you have clean air sort of taken away from you that forcefully, you become a lot more cognizant of the importance of safeguarding it. Well, I think, but I think it took a while for it to seep into the understanding of like the lay public because so many were under the impression that this is just what weather is. Sometimes weather is toxic, and it's not something that we can really control, because the alternative is, what do we just all not heat our homes? Yeah.

Like, you just be cold. We can't do that. Like, that's dangerous. And so, I guess this is the price we pay. What should be shocking, but I would guess perhaps isn't shocking, is that they knew this was going to happen. There were leaders in government who saw this coming from miles away because they understood the dangers.

I mean, we understood the dangers of burning fossil fuels and the substances that were being created in the air and air pollution and breathing that in both chronically and in the acute incident. We understood that already, even at this point in history. Maybe we didn't know the extent of it, and certainly a lot of people outside the scientific community didn't understand the implications very well. But there was definitely at least one thing that should have alarmed them, which was something very similar that happened in Denora, Pennsylvania, in the United States in 1948. So, just a few years before.

Yes. So, just a few years before this, there's a small farming town. It's 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, and it really grew when at first Carnegie Steel built a plant there in 1902. The railroad moved in. There was built a plant there in 1902. The railroad moved in. There was a zinc works there in 1915. And it should be noted that very shortly after all of these big companies, all these big industries

moved into the area and started doing their work and creating air pollution, that people in the area started complaining about the air pollution. That didn't take very long for them to start filing complaints and for the industries involved to start paying fines for air pollution. Because, right, that's how it's often dealt with. Well, if you pollute this much, you've got to pay a fine. And so they pollute that much and pay a fine and then keep on polluting, because the industries are incredibly lucrative, so they can afford the fines, which is what was happening. And so they continued to do the, you know, release all these pollutants into the air

until finally October of 1948, when just like we've described happened with the great smog of London, a great smog, largely containing the kinds of materials that were being put into the air from the steel factoring from the zinc plant specifically. Descended on the town, people got very sick. Initially, 20 people died in the acute event, which again was just a few days in this one year in October. But they found that after it was all over and they sent in investigators to look at the extent of the problem, to really pay attention to it finally, since they'd been crying out for help for a while. They found that 5,000 of the 14,000 locals had had some kind of symptoms ranging from moderate to severe.

And when they looked at their lungs, they took extra rays of their lungs, they said they looked like survivors of poison gas warfare. Because they were inhaling heavy metals and all kinds of particulate and air pollution and everything from a very similar event. And so this was known and documented and written about on a federal level. And I'm certain that there were scientists in the UK who were aware of this when this was happening. And I think there was a push within, as far as I can tell, within government to address it prior to the Great Smog of London.

And then immediately after, it just took a while for everybody to get on board. Yeah, a lot of new pieces. And to own the culpability that the government had in this. It's very easy to try to, especially with this one, that big. I feel like we have a tendency as a species to say, like, I don't know, it's weather. What are we going to do? It's just price-a-do in business. And it's a tough thing to just to say, it continues to be a big problem, not like this. Obviously, these events that occur,

there was another great smog that would occur in London in the early 60s, I believe it was 62, 61 or 62. And the last one of these events did occur, but it was not to this extent, it was not a severe. And since then we haven't had these kinds of like isolated ecological disasters, identical to this. Obviously we've had many other isolated ecological disasters, but not exactly like this.

Since then because they did start to do things, The Clean Air Act in London, really, or in the UK, really did revolutionize the way that they heated people's homes and tried to control air quality. And there have been a lot of strides made since then. Now, I think we all know not enough has been done. And a lot of these big companies, these big industries, are still immune from a lot of regulation because money and lobbying power and they can pay the fines. And I think the other thing that's really interesting. The last little

wrinkle to all this, it's really interesting is that in Denora, what they found too is that as much as the people who lived there were furious that their air had become so low quality and that they were all suffering because of it and that people died acutely and that who knows how many more died later as a result of this. They were also employed by these industries. You know, when a steel plant moves into a town, jobs for people who maybe didn't have one before, good paying jobs. And so you had people who at the same time wanted the federal government to do something

about these industries were actually, and this is literally chasing federal investigators out of the town with guns to prevent them from figuring out what happened because they didn't want the plant shutdown. So I'm hit. The most Virginia you've, you've seen repeated many times over outside powers come in, stripped the natural resources, put the people to work and people are so desperate for work that they'll pretty much accept anything no matter how their home is being sort

of destroyed in process. It's, it's very much, it is exactly like here. And it's interesting when you think about the relationship we have with coal in West Virginia, because not only does the industry employ people, but they're also good paying jobs with benefits and things that are really hard to come by in economically distressed areas.

So it's this idea with industry that if you pay people enough, you can subject them to these harmful, dangerous work and living environments because it harms the whole community. And I don't think, I mean, I think it is not a stretch to say we have certainly not solved this problem yet because we're still burning fossil fuels and we're still polluting the air, not maybe in this way. And maybe we've learned a lot and we've taken a lot of measures to improve things.

But I think we all know there's still a lot more work to be done before this becomes commonplace. That you just accept that the price you pay for living maybe not in London, but on planet Earth is that you inhale deadly pollutants into your lungs on a regular basis. Well, on that cheering note, we're gonna wrap up this episode of Sobering's another fun one

in the books from Miss positivity yourself. I'm sorry, I'm hoping... I'm hoping... I'm hoping... Dr. positivity, Sydney's strong Macroio. I'm hoping doctor positivity. Sydney, scroll, Mac, Royal. I'm hoping the crown gets lighter after this. I would almost have to. What happens next? I don't know.

And I'm afraid to read any history because I'll ruin the show for my life. I just hope Queen Elizabeth lives. Thanks so much for listening to our podcast. We hope you've enjoyed yourself as much as you could. We have a book if you want more of the feeling that you're experiencing right now. Head on over to the bookstore of your choice

and pick up these solbons, paperback. It's got new stuff dealing with like quarantine and things like that and some new illustrations from city sibling Taylor. And we're super, super proud of it. Also, if you wanna learn how to podcast or know someone who does, my brothers and I just released it with contributions from Sydney.

I wrote some too. She wrote some too. It's called everybody has podcasts except you, just came out last Tuesday. If you wanna grab it, we would sure appreciate it because we're really proud of it. We worked on it for a long time and I think it's got a lot of good stuff in there.

I sure hope, you know, Matt Smith is playing Prince Philip and I sure hope he doesn't turn out to do anything questionable or problematic. Because boy, I sure love Matt Smith and I would hate to see that played out. Well, I'm going to say it right here on this show. We love that Prince Philip and everything he's ever done. No, don't say that. That's not true. We've watched four episodes now. I'm sure this level rap scallion will never have a guilt. Listen, I've maybe Wikipediaed some things. That's not okay. She ain't spoilers.

Okay, thanks for listening. Thanks for the taxpayers for your service. This is Tom Madison, so see you in the intro and outro program. Thanks for watching. And that's gonna do it for us for this week. Until next time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head!

Alright! Maximumfun.org Comedy and Culture Artist-Oat? Audience-supported I'm Jesse Thorne On the next bullseye we've got the one and only Ted Danson We'll talk about his new show Mr. Mayor about cheers and about the secret to success in comedy

I feel like one of your signature comedic moves at this point in your career is gazing. You do a lot of interesting gazing. I also love this. Gazing, I love that. And if I'm not, I'm gonna start, because that's great. That's Bullseye, find it on maximumfund.org and PR.org and wherever you get podcasts.

Because that's great. That's Bullseye. Find it on MaximumThund.org and PR.org and wherever you get podcasts.