Citation Needed - Elephants on Acid

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Trigger Warning: This week's episode contains references to animal cruelty as well as a bunch of other stuff that's really gross. This week, Heath talks about scientists gone wild. Our theme song was written and performed by Anna Bosnick. If you’d like to support the show on a per episode basis, you can find our Patreon page here.  Be sure to check our website for more details.  

Just like the cold open from key is cold open for can't peel exactly. Yeah, feels derivative. Right strong agree man strong agree Hey best friends Best friends Bethes you love four of us we are best friends. I do not care for Eli So you guys ready to start the show. Yeah, you know what let's start the actual content of our show Yeah, actual content. Let's start the show? Yeah, you know what? Let's start the actual content of our show. Yeah, actual content. We'll just do the show. It's just, okay, one thing goes.

What's wrong? What? I don't know. It's just, I feel like we need maybe, um, thank you, Tom. I felt crazy. The three of us are best friends. Best friends. Absolutely absolutely best friends. I Don't care for you either Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject read a single

article about an awake a pd and pretend we're experts because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Noah, I'm going to be leading this experiment, but to do that I'm gonna need my at all So joining me tonight are our geologists because he rocks sea salt our oceanographer because he's deep Tom and our Bokeh knowledge is because he's so fucking hot heath and rights No, you're gonna make me Settlemental How could you use that good at the beginning of the show? All right, yeah I don't know I appreciate that but I'm really more of a girth oceanographer

You can be not you can be not. You can be not. And I am not. The most of the most of the most of the name of our something. I don't know like our fans are brothel. Son of that house thing. There we go. All right, so quick before we get to the topic, I wanted to thank our patrons for making this show happen again this week. If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And I should also, according to the 36 point bolded in all caps, flashing note that Cecil

put in the notes right here, add a click content warning because quote, this essay is all kinds of gross in like every imaginable direction. End quote. And I endorse that statement, but I'm quoting it, but it is correct. This is science history. So a lot of fucked up shit happens to a lot of innocent animals, a lot of others shit that's really fucking gross other than that. Yeah, so, so with that out of the way, tell us.

He, you're still here. That's your fault. Okay. It's your fault. I am the one. So, Heath, what person plays think concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today? We're gonna be talking about terrible science experiments that somebody actually did,

which I learned about thanks to the book, Elephants on Acid by Alex Bose. So, there were actually elephants on acid? Yeah, no, there actually were. Yeah, huh. So what, scientific inquiry led to that? Yeah, great question. Yeah, no, it actually starts with the age-old,

great question. What happens when three Oklahoma men have a bunch of acid and they're at the zoo? The answer is science happens, Noah's science. They put 297 milligrams of LSD into an Astar. Jesus! And then they shoot an elephant in the ass. That's what happens.

And we know about that very specific answer thanks to Warren Thomas, director of the Oklahoma City Zoo in 1962. One summer day, he was hanging out with two other scientists, buddies, Lewis West and Chester Pierce. And they had, well, at least 297 milligrams of LSD, plus I'm assuming their headstash. That's about three that's about 3,000 human doses. Minimum, by the way, just context.

And one of them, I'm assuming, said, hey guys, what if we give Tosco the elephant like a giant dose of acid? I was thinking 3,000 human doses. Oh, it's definitely so. Yeah, that's what they did that day. And by the way, if you're wondering why he said that you've clearly never been sitting on 3000 plus human doses of acid. And just to give you some perspective on just how much acid that is, an adult male

elephant is about 65 times heavier than an adult male human, but they shot him up with three thousand doses. Shut up. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, according to Thomas Weston Pierce, they weren't just getting high and then like blow and smoke into their dog's ear. They had a legitimate science reason. They wanted to find out if LSD would make an elephant go into a state called must M U S T H. That's the thing that happens naturally to male elephants once in a while, in which they fly into a murderous rage of temporary insanity,

become highly aggressive and shoot sticky fluid from their glands. Science guys wanted that. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna test it out. Okay, yeah. They could have just put a conservative next to some rainbow shirts at Target. I would have got the same thing.

Yeah. As it turns out, the experiment went badly. I feel like that's just a whole new direction from. Yeah, that was where it doesn't feel like it could have gone good where this was going Tusco gets shot the ass with 3,000 doses of acid he runs around yelling for a while and then he fell down unconscious Science guys figured you know, that's probably a bad trip

So they ran over and gave him a bunch of the anti-psychotic drug thorazine But sadly that didn't help anduscca died about an hour later. Jesus possibly from 3000 doses of Thorazine. Oh, the acid one, the other. And this remained a very important open question in the field of elephant acidology for like 20 years, whether it's the LSD or the Thorazine. But then UCLA's aologist, Ronald Siegel, he decided to figure it out. And of course, yeah. Exactly.

Of course, we would need two elephants for that because I can double. So he gave similar doses of LSD to a pair of elephants. Don't know why there were two. Sure. He did it by mixing it into their water. And apparently, these elephants just started tripping balls and having a really good time.

They walked around all silly, that it looks silly, awesome. Made some adorable noises like birds chirping and mice squeaking from an elephant trunk. Like they trumpeted those noises. It sounds amazing. And after a few hours, they were fine. So in the end, Siegel concluded that nothing, nothing.

He had no conclusion. He said it still could have been the LSD that killed Tusco. Sure. I'm not sure. Right. Okay. So we had a cool afternoon. Look, if your experiment failed because you were unable to coax a 6,000 pound 10 foot,

tall dump truck made a muscle into a murder rage, while it's tripping balls, it's a bad experiment. Do a different fucking experience. Basic heuristic right there, no, just described. Obviously. So next up, we're going to head over to the Soviet Union, where they finally answered the question, how do we chop off ahead with a guillotine and keep it alive after it's chopped off? The world of science had been working on this for centuries, like they really had been.

But it wasn't until 1928 that it finally worked. Soviet Dr. Sergei Rukonenko came up with a machine called the Autojector that operated as a mechanical heart and lung. And he was able to use the Auto-jector on the severed head of a dog to keep it alive. Oh, God. He showed off his device to a big international audience at a conference, and the demonstration included the dog

responding to loud noises by flinching, and responding to light by blinking. The doctor also fed a piece of cheese to the dog, and the cheese got swallowed, and then it pretty much immediately popped out the other end of the suffigee tube. Oh my god. Apparently the crowd went wild for that.

Oh. Where are we now? Is this severed head part of the elephant's trip? What is happening right now? Right now, it's possible. You know, if they can get this right though, it does open up the field of transplanting dog heads onto all kinds of different stuff.

And I'm going to ask if the last seven years of our lives haven't prepared us for that reality. I don't know what else we should accept. Where's the fucking locus, Dumber? That's what I'm saying. It's coming. All right. Well, apparently the living head was such a big success.

It became quote, the talk of Europe according to this book. Even George Bernard Shaw was talking about it. He said, exact quote, I'm even tempted to have my own head cut off what I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness without having to dress and undress without having to eat without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature. And I feel like that's a fitting punishment for anybody who endorsed this idea with a dog.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I agree. All right. Well, now that we're already on the subject of Soviet fucking head chopping. Let's talk about Dr. Vladimir Demakov. In 1954, he proudly announced to the world that he created a dog with two heads.

Apparently, he just grafted the front of a puppy onto the side of a full grown German shepherd, like off the side of his shoulder. And then he spent the next 15 years creating a total of 22 headed dogs that would live for up to a month at a time. I tried to do that with two pugs, but the double amplified sleep apnea blew out

all the windows and the science of the thing. Yeah, this is a big deal. For the Soviet Union's apartment of nightmares that they had, I guess. And journalists were invited to cover the two-headed dog release party that they also had. Here's the description of that initial unveiling. Quote, journalists gasp as both heads simultaneously laptop bowls of milk and then cringed as the milk from the puppy's head dribbled out the unconnected stump of its all the

to false big on the soft shield to the Soviet Union proudly posted that the dog was proof of their nation's medical preeminence sure yeah, I mean at that same time American medicine was pissing away as time developing the polio vaccine. What do we know? Fake okay the puppy grafted on to the German shepherd that sounds horrible But if you can manage to get a third head on there you can guard your gate to hell

Which I just learned is evidently in Russia. Oh there you go. It's in Russia 100 percent in Russia learned is evidently in Russia. There you go. It's in Russia. 100% in Russia. All right, well, at this point, you're probably wondering other than the clear demonstration of medical preeminence, why the fuck would you do that? Well, according to Dr. Demakov, he was testing surgical techniques, hoping to figure out a way to perform a human heart and lung transplant.

And apparently, he actually gets credit for helping pave the way for that to eventually happen. But he also started a terrifying version of the arms race, but with head chopping stuff. The United States heard about the two-headed dog, and we were like, fuck you, monkey head transplant, we're doing that now. So that actually happened. We gave a whole bunch of money to Robert White,

a surgeon in Ohio money to Robert White, a surgeon in Ohio, to remove the head of a monkey and put it onto the body of a different monkey that I'm assuming would have to be beheaded also. And he did that in 1970. Yeah, and then they shelved the project and they called the monkey Curio George. Because Curio kept menail the shelf so

I like that one a lot Spid hours separating all the important Body tubes and they actually did manage to reattach the head To the wall of a cable management To really something else yeah a. A lot of Velcro. Yeah, not like the twist type, but no, no. No, no, no. Definitely Velcro and tubes and stuff.

Yeah. So when the tree was planted, monkeys brain woke up and so it was clearly connected to a new body by fucking asshole from Ohio to monkey angrily tracked Dr. White around the room with its eyes and tried to bite him when he came close. And the monkey might have been even less cool about the whole thing if Dr. White had put the head on backwards. What?

Which was apparently possible. It was according to his notes, easier from a surgical standpoint, how to reconnect it back. How could that be? I don't know. I don't get why that's true, but apparently that's true. According to him, he decided to go with, you know, regular direction because it was better optics with the public. Well, thank you for sparing us the horror. I mean, more horror than what you

mentioned. Yeah, it's not great when your best offense is, you know, of all the places I could have sewn this monkey head. This is a Mon-Molly's school. You're welcome. I just, I am not sure when we stop reading Frankenstein in school, but we should be considered. Yep. That'd be great. What? So after unveiling the amazing monkey head switch, Dr. White was expecting to become a national

hero for that because he was helping with the Cold War, I guess, but instead everyone hated him. No, he was not. No, he was not. Why would you have an arms race of head chopping and we're attaching shit. Stop, stop doing that. We got nothing, Vader America is full of backward headed monkey. Backward headwrap is too big,

backward headwrap we, we, we, we, we, no, of course not. Right. So everyone hated him. He thought he's going to be a national hero, but everybody hated him for, for being that guy who did the terrifying monkey head thing. Regardless, Dr. White decided to go on a big tour of the country, along with a near-codrop legic man

named Craig who volunteered to be the first human to get his face transplanted. What? Yeah, well, as far as we know that never happened, but the idea was a traveling show for a while, just the concept of it. Step right up. See the guy who says he's willing to someday maybe have an operation. What the fuck is the show?

They must have had a barker saying that. I don't know what was happening in the world all the time. Why would a quadriplegic guy need a new face? It's not none of it clear, but what if things happen? So now I don't feel like I understand that word. He. Next up, it's even worse with one of the original examples of conversion therapy. This is horrible.

And naturally, that kind of scientific crime came out of Canada, our embarrassing big it neighbors. Fucking typical. It all starts in 1954 when James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered the feel-good center of the brain, and they were able to produce extreme sensations of pleasure and sexual arousal with electrical stimulation of that region. When they hooked up their device to the brain of a lab rat and gave the rat a button so the rat could self-stimulate, that rat would smash the button about two thousand times an hour.

Geez, I hope you at least used hand lotion. Later, scientists Ben and Jerry would put that in pint-sized form. All right, well, that brings us to America, where the actual hate crime obviously happened. It wasn't Canada. In 1970, yeah, obviously. Some big hit at Tulane University in Louisiana decided that the best application of the arousal button would be making a gay person have hetero brain sensations. What? The subject of the experiment was referred to as patient B19, and this guy was hooked

up to electrodes and given the self-stimulation button. And he pressed it about 1500 times over three hours, and he got so much euphoria that the bigot doctor had to turn off the machine. But then the doctor decided that B19's libido was all yoked up nice and good, perfect for his thing. So he went ahead with his plan of adding a female sex worker to the mix.

That was next. Oh, okay. And anybody else feeling like he dreamed up this experiment retroactively after he got caught paying for a sex worker with a company card or something. Yes. Yeah, like Larry is the lab full of hookers again, because they better be science hookers or work in trouble.

I'm doing these science hookers. Look, I have a spreadsheet open, I might talk to you So, Dr. Got approval from the state attorney general for the next step That would be Jack P.F. Gramellian by the way, who's known for opposing desegregation and getting convicted of perjury and sent to federal prison. Sounds about right. And refusing to resign and running for reelection,

losing and also sponsoring a scientific crime. So with that guys go ahead, B19 was jacked up on neuro-electrical Molly again and placed in a room with a 21 year old sex worker. For an hour, B19 just hung out in the room, all happy. While the bigot doctor, I'm assuming, tried to angrily masturbate on the other side of the mirror, couldn't get it going, got angry some more. So then, the sex worker was told to initiate and the two had a sexual encounter finally.

The doctor called this incredibly stupid non-fucking experiment a positive result. Now I watch you fuck was part of the experiment really. All right, well, you're probably wondering now what about doctors who drink vomit? Oh, no, no, next up, who we have, let the vomit drinking doc. This one goes back to the early 1800s in Philadelphia, where Stubbins for Firth was a physician in training. I'm so sorry, did you say his name was to Stubbins? It's Stubbins for Firth with two S. That's right.

What the fuck? That's his name. So you kinda had to see the trauma, right? For furth, it's like, we gotta name them something great. They're our last names of shitty. Stubbins, I panicked. I said, Stubbins, shh. Shit.

Yeah, so that all happened. What? One of the big name diseases at the time of Stubbins was yellow fever. And he noticed that it was everywhere during the summer, but almost entirely disappeared during the winter. And he theorized that all the other doctors were wrong about yellow fever being contagious.

Instead, he claimed it was caused by all the summery stuff, like heat and noise and food. And food is decided to test that theory by exposing himself to as much yellow fever as he could find. And if he didn't get it, then he was definitely right. Okay, quick point. Was he studying yellow fever perhaps in bears?

Because food is very much a year round thing and like you're right. I didn't talk. So his noise actually has a true sound. I guess he thought he was talking about funnel cake, like summer food, like the fair. I don't know. So if you're thinking this guy's stubborn, like, and shakeups, if you're going to take it easy and kind of cheat the results, you would be gravely mistaken. He fucking went for it. First, he

took a knife and made cuts all over his arms, and then he poured, quote, fresh black vomit from a yellow fever patient right into all the cuts. He did not get sick from that. And he put effective vomit. He put to vomit straight into his eyeballs. Wow. What? Yeah, I've heard you do that with acid. You drop it. You drop it. 3,000 doses of it. Right in your eye. Yeah, that didn't work. He made a yellow fever vomit capsule and swallowed it. And work. He drank several glasses of undiluted black vomit. What is, I guess he was cutting it with like soda earlier, but then he did it just undiluted, didn't work.

And he tried it. And he tried it. And he fried up some black vomit in his hand. I just need to take a break. Inhale the fumes of black vomit from the saute pan. To lie. Still didn't get the elephant. Okay, now I'm, I'm'm going back to fresh black vomit.

Do they have a first in first out system for vomit storage? What is happening? Rotate the stock. All right. Yeah. So apparently, stubborns felt like the experiment still needed a bit more rigor on top of all the stuff. I just said so he collected large amounts of other bodily fluids from yellow fever patients. There's um weird day at the hospital for those people.

So go back to the lab. It's weird. And slathers himself in blood, sweat, saliva, and urine. There are no fever patients. Okay. And he still never got sick. And that's how we know that yellow fever is not contagious. Yes, it is. It's extremely contagious. It is extremely contagious, but it requires direct transmission into the blood stream. I have no idea how stubborn's never got sick, but he never did. All right. Well, I can't be the only one who feels the sudden need to make a snack for stubbens, which is

going to be my only term for vomiting from now on, by the way. Oh my god. So we're going to take a little break for some apropos of none. Okay, but Test subject two loves to cat tree not a huge fan of the fishing toy and hot and cold on the felt mice hot and cold huh what does that mean yeah I will we need to come up with a terminology to describe when the kitten would be very involved in one toy and then just at just as quickly disregards it. Oh, I see. What about them playing with each other? Oh my God, you should see the black one when he play bounces his brother so freaking cute. Does he but wiggle? The low to the ground. He does it. He gets real low when he does the but we go, we, we, he loves to camp

on the side of the catry and then just jump on him when he walks by. What about sleeping? Well, they all like to climb up to the platform that we have by the window with blankets on it when the sun is shining and sleep together. Cat pile up there. It's total cat pile. Yeah, and they also climb under the blankets if it's cloudy that that's so cute. I know.

I know. So do you think if we keep doing these cute experiments for a few years, we'll be able to brain bleach those animal head transplant experiments out of our memories? Nope, I don't think that. We at least shouldn't reattach the tear ducts, that was. And we're back when we last left off. Heath was populating my next seven years of nightmares.

So what else do you have for us Heath? Yeah, what do you have for the two listeners that stuck with us through that? It's so bad. Hope you're all having a good time. Both. Dave. Both have a good day. Next up, we have two different studies that demonstrated pretty decisively that human beings

are a failed experiment as like a group. And they both paved the way for a topic we covered way back in episode 10, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, in which people got randomly assigned to be mock prisoners or mock prison guards, and the guard people immediately became drunk with power and extremely abusive, like right away. Well, Stanford people might have seen that coming if they knew about Carnegie Landis and his 1924 facial reaction study at the University of Minnesota. Most of the experiment actually had nothing to do with human cruelty. Landis was just giving people different types of stimuli and taking a picture of their face.

This was stuff like smell of the semonia or look at this porn and I'll take a picture of your face. But for the final stimulus, he'd put a live rat on a plate right in front of him and tell the people to chop its head off with a knife. Oh Jesus! Jesus, why not? Yeah, he wanted to know the facial expression for rat chopping,

which is crazy and doesn't matter. What does matter is that two thirds of the Minnesota grad students in that study did what he told them and be headed alive rat. Okay, all right, but what did they sew it on to afterwards that changes the morality. Oh, it's adorable with a cheese falls back out again. A cheese science. Not only did we learn that's like exactly at the same time as that first dog thing that's messed up.

So not only did we learn that way too many people are willing to chop a rat's head off with a knife, we also learned that people are really bad at chopping a rat's head off with a knife. According to Landis, quote, the effort and attempt to hurry usually resulted in a rather awkward and prolonged job of decapitation. Uh, that's an accurate description of my sexual style, actually. I'd be way more worried if they were all nailing it. Oh, right.

If they were all the, actually, that would have been the scary. If they were all, yeah, yeah. Oh, obviously, which you, which you, you yeah. So it's like, I guess, yeah, finally, it's my time to show you bring your own knife. All right. All right. Well, in case it wasn't clear already, Karnie Landis was not well for the one third of the group that refused to kill the

rat. Landis would yell at him for a while and then grab the knife and chop off the rats head himself. Okay. But did he take pictures of their faces? This is what needs to be known. Right. It was their science. That's actually it's a good point. That's probably why. So apparently, Cornelandus didn't get published very prominently for that.

And in 1961, a psychology professor at Yale named Stanley Milgram decided to find out exactly how much torture and homicide people are willing to do if they're commanded. Yeah, so like nothing happened in the world between 2024 and 1961 to give me any information about that. So he called the obedience experiment. But I'm joking there a bit. Joking aside, Milgram actually was trying to examine the psychology of genocide. The experiment happened right after the start of the trial for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Milgram was trying to answer the question,

could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders, could we call them accomplices? Sad reflection here, what kind of fucked up point have you reached in your life when one of your colleagues feels the need to say, but all joking aside, this was about genocide. Stay with me, it is about genocide. It's confusing how that show.

It's burning. It's burning stuff. It's the experiment work. Milgram would bring in two volunteers at a time and tell him he was conducting a study about the effect of punishment on learning ability. But one of them was actually an actor working with Milgram. They'd each get a slip of paper,

make it look like they were being randomly given a role as either the teacher or the learner. But Milgram wrote teacher on both slips, so the unknowing subject would always be the teacher and the actor guy would pretend they got learner on their slip. From there, the teacher would help the learner memorize pairs of words and then they do a quiz. During the quiz, the teacher, the real subject, was told to give the learner an electric shock for each wrong answer by pressing a button on a

machine that was hooked up to the learner. And the intensity of the shock would be going up by 15 volts after each wrong answer. So it seemed like a test of learning under pressure to the unknowing subject, but the actual question being answered by Milgram was, how many shocks of increasing severity would the teacher be willing to administer with that shock? Based on some of the teachers that I've had in my life, I am quite confident to answer is infinite shocks of increasing severity. Yeah. So here's a few other details in the setup. Once they assigned the roles, the teacher and the learner got taken into the next room where the learner would be strapped into a device that looked like an electric chair. This was fake and real shocks weren't going

to happen, but the teacher didn't know that. At this point, Milgram, or one of his hired people dressed in a lab coat for extra authority, would explain that the electric chair with the restraining straps was to make sure the learner wouldn't escape. And before they got started with the quiz, Milgram would give the teacher a quick first-level shock to demonstrate what was gonna happen. Okay, so if first is, we're gonna strap them into this chair so they can't escape, and you even stick around to hear a second.

I'm so many questions in here, but I'm not right here. Okay, that's cool, but like, let me feel the shock. Go quick. Just give me like the first, yeah, apparently that was part of the deal. So from there, the teacher was taken into a different room. They'd be able to communicate with the learner, but they wouldn't be able to see each other. After being given some time to memorize the word pairings,

the quiz would begin, including shocks after each wrong answer. And after a shock, the teacher would hear a pre-recorded pain response from that actor playing the learner. As the intensity levels went up, the learner would start making audible protests from the other room and like banging on the wall and stuff. And if the voltage got all the way up to the max of 450, the learner would go completely

silent. And the teacher would dig the key for the handcuffs out of the learner's dead body, like saw fucking a lot of saw going on. Yeah. So subjects, the experiment, we're all random people from New Haven, Connecticut who got paid $4 for an hour of their time, which is like $40 now. And some of these people had some amount of humanity so they'd ask to stop at a certain point. And that's when Milgram would give a series of verbal prods that he planned ahead of time. At the first complaint, he'd say, please continue. And apparently that was a perfectly cogent argument and lots of the teachers kept going after hearing, please continue.

At the second complaint, he'd say, the experiment requires that you continue. That would also work sometimes. Prod number three was, it is absolutely essential that you continue and prod four was, you have no other choice you must go on. Okay, were these cattle prods or just, just words? Just words each of them are effective on some people who had insane lines in the sand. If the teacher still wanted to shut it down after all four of those prods, the experiment was finally halting. Otherwise kept going until the 450 volt shock happened three times in a row.

And yes, a bunch of these teachers shocked the person into silence as far as they knew. And then did that two more times. Mm-hmm. If nothing, this serves as an important reminder about the American electorate during Trump's third presidential campaign, right? It's a good point, Noah, because I actually wasn't going to buy an NFT of Trump as an AI cowboy astronaut race car driver, but then I got an email that said I had to. So I cashed out all of my Bitcoin and bought a different digital baseball card. And it's all gonna be just fine.

I love the Trump bucks that got sold. Yes, Trump idiots. And they tried to redeem him at like Walmart. And yeah, the fucking we use money here at Walmart. I was told I could get like a thousand real ones for 90. Now we're a money store. So we're a money store. So we're a money store. We have money.

All right. So here's the final results of the Milgram obedience experiment. First, the good news. Every teacher paused the experiment at least once. And that would be the end of the good news for humanity. Oh no. Almost all the people who paused it were fine to continue

after being told, please continue once. And a few people asked if the shocks would cause permanent physical harm, but Milgram told them, yeah, it is painful, but there's no permanent tissue damage, and all those people kept going. As the shocks got worse, many of the teachers exhibited signs of stress, including sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, awkward smiling, and nervous laughter, and kept going. In total, two thirds of the teachers kept pressing the shock button all the way up to 450 volts. And when the learner fell silent, the order to give another shock was followed nearly 100% of the time.

They were like, pot committed to the torture thing at that point. Wow. And they have going. And here's the conclusion we got from Milgram. He said, if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.

And yeah, the results are terrifying. And the experiment, it's been recreated a bunch of times with similar results. But it is worth mentioning that plenty of experts have since pointed out how the experiment at Yale University in Connecticut might not be exactly the same as the literal half-poster. That being said, the results were a big surprise to everybody who tried to predict what was going to happen. Before it started, Milgram pulled a bunch of psychology people, and they all predicted that somewhere between zero and three out of a hundred subjects would get all the way

through and inflict that maximum voltage. And Milgram himself fully changed his mind about another prediction. Be theorized that the obedience of Nazis was based on something in their, like, germanitude. So he was planning to run the experiment on German people after the experiment with Americans. But the results with the Americans showed him it was just, you know, people are fucking bad. Yeah. And do the second one. Americans showed him it was just, you know, people are fucking bad. Yeah. And do the second one.

No, I feel like still today, are we really this fucking awful as an under explored question in science? Yeah. Arrifying. So, the Milgram experiment, I was like, big headliner, big section there, but I didn't want to close on the genocid nature of human beings. I just wanted to avoid that somehow. So we have one more very important science question. How much of a partial turkey

will another turkey want to have sex with? Thank you for asking that. Thank you. No, I know, yeah, inquiring minds wants to know for centuries. So especially Ivy League professors, that would include Martin Schein and Edgar Hale at the University of Pennsylvania, Donald Trump's alma mater. They noticed that male turkeys will try to fuck just about any

physical object that's even remotely similar to a female turk. So naturally, that knowledge turned into a bet about the bare minimum of sexual stimulus required to get a male turkey to start mating with an object. Yeah. You come home and the turkey is banging the hand turkey drawing your kid made the tang on the fridge. Well, so though, but this explains where all that weird turkey hybrid meat from the grocery store comes from, like, turkey bologna.

Well, absolutely no, actually the turd ducking is really just a roasted bird orgy. Caliante. I mean, like, it really is hot though. I just totally know actually that turd duck and is really just a roasted bird origin. It's Caliente. I mean, like, it really is hot though. No, it is. 165. She wouldn't want to eat it. It was 65. That's 65.

So, he started by building a model of a female turkey and then taking away little pieces of the body one by one and seeing if male turkey is still down to smash at that point. Side note, I wanted to see what wild turkey sex looks like and there was plenty of information available, like a lot, no problem. Here's what I learned. From mid-March until June, male wild turkeys spend their entire day just doing elaborate fuck postures and that's

it. And they also get a face erection. The fleshy waddle on their neck and their throat and the snooze, it's called the part that's above their beak. Those all get engorged with blood and they snap into shape, it's a wrecked tissue. And when two turkeys pair off, the couple does a little dance where they circle around each other.

Like, it looks like they're about to sword fight in a musical, honestly. And then the male turkey ends up standing on top of the female turkey and he does different dance. There's more like a Michael Flatley thing with a jig. And then they smush,

a walkus together, and that's turkey mating. Somehow a prolonged explanation of turkey sex is the least disturbing part of your assing. You should do it. I want to, I want to do it. I thought that you're following us sleep tonight. I just want you to find the thing.

He's browser history is weird. Listen, this was nothing. This did not, this helped it if anything, I would say. So this got him off the FBI list. We're not going to talk. Right, so anyway, with turkeys, it's technically all butt stuff and all the other stuff like all at the same time.

It's pretty cool. The Quaka is a cool thing. It's just like all the different stuff. And if major body components are missing in wild turkey sex, you just play through. You move past that. Keep don't. And here's how we learned about it specifically. First, they removed the tail of the Lady Turkey dummy, and that didn't change anything. Then they removed the feet, then the wings and progressively more and more of the body. Still no change. Eventually, dummy was nothing but a lady Turkey's head on a stick.

And that did finally change the behavior. The male Turkey preferred the head on a stick. What really? Okay, but maybe after a long day. Yes. I have no idea. How that's like evolutionarily possible, but that's what it said. So obviously, the science was not quite done yet. Obviously, shine and hail still needed answers. So they kept herring down the head on a stick with little pieces of the face missing. And it turns out male turkeys just do not have deal breakers.

Like, I guess it's kind of woke if you think about it, right? Right. Okay, so they don't have any deal breakers. They're just and your tape fans. It's not, okay, it's not woke. It's not woke. So in the end, the study concluded that a freshly severed female head impaled on a stick was the most sexually desirable object

these male turkeys. And in terms of a bare minimum, they found that if the male turkeys were provided with nothing but a stick holding a piece of also wood that was in the vague shape of a head, they would still try to mate with it. Wow. So, all right, so if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Scientists are stupid. Do your own research. Do your own research.

What we learned. Terrifying. Love it. So are you ready for the quiz? He's ready for the quiz. All right. I'll start stuff. Why did you burn me with all this fucked up knowledge that I'll never be able to purge from the forefront of my fucking mind? Thank you for asking. No, thank you. Good question. Hey, still mad about all the tall jokes. Be your psyche could not bear the way to loan. See, this is help. Now that it's in Putin's hands, everybody needs to know the Russians have done the preliminary work on spawning Cerberus, the great guardian of Hades for D. I'm the one

who first suggested we bring Eli on board. It's definitely see the Hades thing for sure. No, that makes sense. You were thinking of us. That's nice. Keith, master baster, B, a yanks giving, C, hot sausage stuffing machine, or D, who's fleshlight? I thought he's definitely going to have a few master baster. It is. Master. I was good. It is, masterpieces. I was good as a nice. I was about to doubt myself and switch to goos flashlight.

No, masterpieces. It's a masterpieces. It's a tape. Yes. Next. So to the turkey. All right, Heath, the Milgram experiment, quite famous and equally famously disturbing, proves what about our show?

Hey, listeners will still download this show next week. If we tell them, download it. Be, at least one person will hear this episode and then think, you know what, now is a good time to become a patron. No, it's not. And into Denali's seat, Trump really could shoot some on a Fifth Avenue, now there's a scene.

Yeah. Yeah, I see. If I go to jail though, is he gonna go to jail? Incidentally see Trump really could shoot someone a fifth avenue. No, there's a scene. Yeah Yeah, he's gonna go chal though. He's gonna go Maybe maybe Yeah, let's hope let's hope I Seriously hope so yeah, we just just based on nothing but hope we're gonna say heath is the winner He got all the answer Nailed it all right. Let's get uh, let's get Tom going next week. All right.

Well, for Cecil Heath and Tom, I'm Noah, thank you for hanging out with us today. We're gonna be back next week, but then Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then you can hear Tom and Cecil on Cognitive Distance. I still don't know which one is cognitive and which one is dissonance, but I do have my suspicions. And if you like, don't keep this show going. We're gonna per episode donation at patreon.com, so citation pod, or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you would like to get in touch with us, be a per episode donation at patreon.com. So, citation pod, or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you would like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod.com.

CognitiveDistance is the name of our two-headed terrifying dog. Oh, there you go. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC