Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that isn’t the worst podcast, it’s just a tribute. I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me is Shea! I'm Shea, and this week I learned that horses get farted on more than any other animal. Round Table Quick announcements. The last few shows have come out a few days after our stated Friday release. Part of this is because, due to work and life schedules, Thursday has become the de facto recording day, and getting the show recorded, edited, reviewed, documented, and prettied is usually more than one evening’s work — especially as we’ve exceeded our 30min target runtime now… for like 2 months solid. With that in mind, our new plan is to release Monday mornings. Patrons are likely to get their episodes — complete with exclusive stories and outtakes — Sunday or whenever the production process is completed. This week asks a simple question: if you tickle a yeti, does he grunt? … Shea? This Week’s Beer Is the Salt Creek Citra IPA From friend-of-the-shows Brendon! Thanks, buddy. * https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/54696/400897/ America IPA at 7.7% ABV and too few scores to do the math on. * Aaron: 9* Shea: 9 The Worst Year So, 2021 was not ideal, but everything’s relative. Let’s talk about the worst year. Some of you may have an idea of where I’m going with this because you listen to Scathing Atheist and thereby Citation Needed. 1816 — The Dawn Of Jussssstinian’s Suckage To be clear, 1816 sucked. Nearly 2020 levels of suckage. Per Noah, it led to famine, mass migration, and Mormonism. Mount Tamboura in Indonesia erupted in 1815 and put 100 cubic Kilos of Mount Tamboura into the atmosphere. The island basically just died. The dust that entered the atmosphere caused lowered global temperatures, known today as the “little ice age” for good reason. Sulfuric fog, acidic rain, and massively polluted water killed crops and starved entire contents. India lost its monsoons. China found them. Even artwork from the time got… bleak. So anyway, millions of people died and that’s a real downer. Still not the worst. For the worst year, we need to go back another thousand and change… Welcome to 536 A.D. The world is a gross, illiterate, dumpster fire. The revival of the Roman Empire was… not going as planned. There was famine, plague, oh, and the sun was blocked out to a near-biblical degree for 18 months. Real cats and dogs living together, real wrath of god stuff. 536 is such a terrible year, in the middle of a terrible decade, that I’m not even going to try to bury the surprise of it all in my usual low-hanging comedic fruit way. There’s no need. Each day in 536 was worse than the previous, delivering a nearly endless supply of terrible to punctuate this essay. A lot of what we’ll talk about comes from records made during Justinian’s attempt to reunify the empire. He traveled with poets and scholars to record what he hoped would be his exploits — rather than the string of seemingly unending uprisings and secessions it actually was. Well… ye-olde writers and ice cores, dendrological records, and historical metallurgy. It should be noted that when I say “reunify,