Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Toothpicks

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why toothpicks are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Toothpicks, known for being wooden, famous for being pointy wood. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why toothpicks are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden.

Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of toothpicks? I always liked the minty ones. Remember those where they would have like, it was like a toothpick, but it was infused with mint? And when I was a kid, I would straight up chew on those things. And it was like I was a beaver going after a little post-dinner snack. So I liked the minty ones.

I'm not a big toothpick user except for checking cake consistency. I almost never use them for their intended purpose of picking between the teeth. I use floss for that. Same. And I always got a kick out of the old cartoons where they would take an entire log and then whittle it down to a single toothpick and show that as being sort of the process of creating a toothpick. It's always very funny. Yeah, yeah, like the beaver gets it down that tight. Yeah.

Or Bugs Bunny hides his entire body behind a tree that's skinny. There's all kinds of fun wood jokes. Sure, yeah. Like you have a toothpick factory and it's beavers chewing down logs. to the size of toothpicks. Yeah. I have the same relationship to them. I remember the mint ones from especially like middle school.

I knew a guy who was like, have a mint toothpick. But I never had like a toothpick phase. Wait, stop, stop. You knew a guy who was like have a mint toothpick. What do you mean? Yeah, he had a little case of them. And he also, it was my classmate. This is another student?

Yeah, it was a classmate named Paul. And he also, instead of having a backpack, he had a briefcase. That was his other interesting attribute. He had a briefcase in school. He's like boss baby, but middle schooler. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

And he had, man, middle school was a time to test out personalities. Yes, I think he was trying stuff. Yeah, yeah. He was trying stuff. We all did. We all tried out. I tried being Canadian for about a week. I remember you mentioned this.

Yes. Honestly, great move. It's a good country. So this guy best dressed in business casual, I assume, handing out mint toothpicks. See, that's what, he didn't dress all that differently, but he preferred truly just a business briefcase, which he had his like folders and a book or two in. Briefcase, but like, you know, normal, you know, normal t-shirt and jeans. and then also minty toothpicks that he would offer to his colleagues. Yeah, and I've never had a time when I really carried around toothpicks or had toothpicks about.

I super prefer floss for getting food out of my teeth. It's just a lot better. It's so much better. It gets in there so much easier. So, like, obvious, I floss regularly for the hygiene, but when it's, when I do have, like, an acute tooth incident where something is, jammed in there and I can either see it or feel it and it's bothering me. You know, shamefully, my first move is fingernail, obviously. Yeah.

And then if that fails, then it is floss time. Toothmicks have never really gotten in there good enough for me. I don't know. Like, and when I do, if I like really try to jam them in there, there's the danger that the tip breaks off. And now you have like both a little piece of broccoli and a little piece of wood in your tooth. And then what do you do? You, like, get another toothpick, and then that breaks off as well.

And then you just, an entire tree gets between your mouth teeth. Yeah, it's a dental catamari Damasci situation. Right. Increasingly objects are glomming onto each other. It's the little lady who swallowed a fly, but it's increasingly large objects getting stuck between your teeth. And you can't call for help because the mouth region is chaos. Sure. It's not, it's not.

It's going to, yeah. No one's going to want to, no one's going to want to. that situation. Yeah, I'll just wait all the way until I am home and can use floss, even if the restaurant or whatever has toothpicks. You don't carry around pocket floss. No, I don't do that, no. I don't either, but now it just occurred to me that maybe I should. Yeah, it would make it less of a torment waiting to get home and finally just, uh, and get it out. If I could, if I could go back to middle school, I would have a briefcase, uh, filled with pocket floss and just offer it to my my fellow students after lunch, would you care for some emergency

floss after eating a meal for your hygiene? I would have been the bell of the ball, the most popular girl in school. Just twirling, but your briefcase is hitting everyone. You're not keeping it close to the body at all. I also, my other favorite pop culture toothpick is, There's a Hong Kong action movie called Hard Boiled from the 90s. And Chow Yun Fat is this awesome police detective who's in constant elaborate John Wu gunfights and also has a toothpick perfectly in his mouth throughout. That's kind of cool. Yeah, that's like a thing is like having a toothpick in your mouth, which I, my understanding of that is it was like a thing to do because like if you're not smoking, you're still kind of have the impulse to have something to play with. in your mouth so you want a toothpick.

I don't know. I guess I don't know where that started. I actually turned up an origin, at least in the U.S. Really? And that Hong Kong action movie is recent enough that the U.S. probably influenced it. So, yeah, we'll get there. Yay. It turns out there's super specific toothpick culture in the United States.

But they're truly stiff to me. I never think about them except for today. Yeah. And also thank you to Matthew LGO for suggesting this topic. friend of the show. Also, an excellent nonfiction author. One of my favorite books ever is The President is a Sick Man by Matthew LGO. Wow. About Grover Cleveland at his crimes and so on. So thank you, Matthew. Amazing. This is a fun topic idea. Incredible.

And on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, You Take the Numbers Good and Bad, you do the math, and then you have the stats of life, the stats of life. Nice. That was submitted by Dangit Bob on the Discord. Thank you, Dang it, it, Bob. We have a new name for this segment every week. Dang it, Dang it, Dang it, Bob.

Bobby. Mama. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them a silly and make it as possible. submit through Discord or to sitpot at gmail.com. And the first number this week is 1.8 million years ago. Almost two million years ago. That's the age of our oldest evidence of humans picking their

teeth. Wow. Like regularly picking stuff out of their teeth. Humans have been on the earth a long time. It's easy to forget how long we've been because civilization is relatively recent. But we'd been on earth as human beings for a while. And then we had sort of a technology explosion of tools that brought us into actually having civilization. But we were just like kind of squatting for you know a really long time before that yeah there's like the good current era which started when podcasting was invented right exactly and before that there was agriculture and so on whatever and then before that just millions of years of humans hanging out very very early evidence of podcasting where you just have like a stone carved in the shape of a microphone

a stone jar of brain pills the pills are just stones they don't do anything but neither do the brain pills. It's all stones. March, a t-shirt carved out of stones. Use code stone at stone to get stone for stone. This episode of stone brought to you by stone. Stone. Stone.

We have actually two separate finds of ancient human teeth that indicate marks and grooves from frequent toothpicking and toothpick action. One of them's in modern Kenyan. the others in the modern West Asian country of Georgia. This find in Kenya around the year 2000, American anthropologists found remains at Olduvai Gorge, where one ancient molar had unmistakable evidence of having been repeatedly probed by its owner. And based on microscopic examination, there's no way chewing could have done it. They think it was either a bone or wood toothpick that they made to pick at that part of their teeth or just hold the pick there.

I mean, some bones are pretty pointy and sharp. Like you can use the bone as a toothpick if you want to be real paleo about it. We must ritoverne to bone toothpicks. Real men pick their teeth with bones. And then he cut to the guy doing it and he's like, ow, ow, ow, oh, oh, geez, ow. And then the other find is Dmanisi in modern. again, it's a country called Georgia. Swiss anthropologists found human remains from that same era 1.8 million years ago.

And the remains of a person there indicated damage to the person's gums from overuse of a toothpick. That's wild. Like how does, because obviously the gums aren't there anymore because their meat and meat goes away after a few million years. So like what are they looking at like the sort of bone region around the gums? Like, how do they know that the gums are damaged? Yeah, the teeth and also the jawbone. It had, like, decayed in a way that indicated severe gum problems. If you toothpick way too frequently and aggressively, you can poke at and harm your gums and give yourself problems.

Yeah, also, same thing with brushing. If you brush too hard, you can cause your gums to recede. It's counterintuitive, but, like, sometimes if you're, like, really trying to, like, brush hard, like, to get really clean, It's actually worse for you because you're hurting your gums. That's a thing. Yeah. And also these remains, there was specifically a small cylinder-shaped lesion. And so they think that it's where a toothpick was going through because this person just kept kind of compulsively.

Jammin in there. Ow, ow, ow. But boy, are my teeth picked. Yeah. And between like tooth grooves and gum damage and other evidence, we find homo sapiens picking its teeth, starting all. almost two million years ago, maybe earlier, and we just haven't found the remains. And according to the journal Science, there's also similar grooves and striations in the teeth of Neanderthals. But there are not those kind of grooves in more primitive hominid species like Australopithecus.

They're not in higher primates, such as chimpanzees. So according to anthropologist Peter Unger of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Toothpick use might be something along the lines of language and warfare and other things that are, quote, behavior unique to our genus. Because the connection between a tool and your personal grooming is pretty tricky. Yeah. Primates that we didn't evolve from them, but the ones that are currently alive like orangutans and chimpanzees and gorillas, the complex apes, they do a lot of grooming. But in terms of, like, using tools to groom themselves, they can use tools. Like, they have figured out how to use tools to, like, get food, termites, made sponges for drinking.

But, like, the tool used to, like, precise grooming purposes, the closest things are probably, like, sometimes they might use some, some, something to scratch at themselves. Oringotans have been, like, when they watch humans using soap, they kind of copy it. and then like lick it off their arms it's thought that they don't it's not really for cleaning it's because they're curious about the sensation because they see humans using soap and then when they find the soap they like copy them and then they're curious about the taste so they'll like lather it on their arms and then like lick it off so you can see that they're like almost there with maybe being able to use like a toothpick but my guess would be that it's a lot harder to have something that might require a little bit of a mental connection and dexterity in terms of tool use

that's like just a little bit more complicated. Yeah, not all primates are on our level with this. Like the journal science, they have kind of a jokey headline for this of man, the toothpick user as like, look at us. It's one of our mightiest achievements as a species compared to our relatives and ancestors. The only thing that separates us, really. Kind of, yeah. And next quick number here is two,

because there have been two super general kinds of toothpicks across history, either something disposable made on the spot or something made to last. So it's kind of like chopsticks. Yeah, it really fits that because we think the very first toothpicks were probably just simple materials that fit the purpose of getting something out of a tooth, including possibly stalks of grass, almost used like a floss. Right. But beyond that, humans have made basically every possible material into a toothpick over time.

Examples include wood, bone, bamboo, rocks, metals, tortoise shells, bird feathers, even celluloid when we develop that plastic. But the two most common lifestyles are either you just improvise something as needed or you make a nice toothpick to keep. and there's many people who have sought luxury toothpicks as a status object over time. Okay. And one number there is the year 68 AD. 68 AD is the death date of the Roman Emperor Nero. And critics of Nero accused him of extravagance, carelessness. That all could be true.

It all could be propaganda by his enemies. But one of the most believable claims about him is that he made a point of doing sort of a grand entrance at banquets where Nier. would enter with a silver toothpick held in his mouth. It's like, it's eating time, and I'm the emperor, you know? Hey, it's me the emperor, about to eat. Yeah. So funny, because in a modern context, someone with a toothpick in their mouth is not like a kingly person.

They're like sort of, you know, maybe a rapscallion a little bit, you know, like sort of more of a, the fawns, a bit of a, the fond situation, so. Yeah, it's me. Time to feast. Nero hits the jukebacks. It plays loot. It's not exciting at all. Yeah, and it also is believable that, you know, a silver toothpick for a Roman emperor, that's a trivial luxury that's easy to get. It's also practical. So that might have happened. And another sign of luxury toothpicking comes from the early 1500s AD because a Renaissance painting features one. There was a Venetian painter named Alessandro Oliverio who painted a rich young man. Neither that painter nor the subject are famous, but the painting is famous because

a man had a gold chain around his neck showing off a curved golden toothpick. Wow. Hung on the chain. I'm looking at this first note. He's got that classic Spaniel ears haircut, or it's just like the haircut is just like make me look like a Cocker Spaniel. Yeah, it's a little bit farquod, a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the toothpick itself, yeah, there's like a gold chain.

Like to me, it doesn't immediately register as a toothpick because it's kind of curved. But I can definitely see it being, yeah, like an interdental pick. Totally. It has bird talon energy to me. Right. But that's one example of also toothpicks being all sorts of sizes, shapes, and styles before modern times. Now we've kind of industrialized it down to that little wooden thing.

It's kind of gross because, like, you pick your teeth with this, and then it's also just around your neck all the time. Yeah, I also find that gross. Yeah. It's also, like, exposed. Like, what if you get splashed by hilarious medieval medieval? stuff in the street, you know, and then... Yeah, like, and now you're putting it in your mouth.

Yeah. So, yeah, so that painting is more famous than the artist or the guy because of the funny toothpick in it. I'll have it linked it. It's now in the National Gallery of Ireland, also, if you want to go see it in an Irish museum. But beyond those luxury styles, there's further wild shapes and designs across history. A link an NPR piece that shows off interesting designs from Portugal and also interesting

designs from Japan for relatively everyday toothpicks. And the Japanese one, they developed a toothpick tradition at one point of toothpicks where the ends can snap off and then be used as a stand a lot like for chopsticks and fitting Japan's development of disposable wooden chopsticks. Yeah, I mean, I remember sometimes getting these when I was a kid. And I didn't under, I just thought it was decorative, the little thing. at the end. Yeah, same. Those little grooves, it turns out you can snap it off and prop up the mouth end of your toothpick so it's not resting on a table or whatever. Wow. And then we'll talk

oddly more later about Portuguese toothpicks. But we have a few examples in that MPR piece of toothpicks just with intricate spiraling grooves along the shaft. That was for a better grip and just for artistic style. There was a big tradition of carving orange tree wood into fine toothpicks. Portugal. And were they disposable or were they most like to keep? They were meant to be used repeatedly. I see. Wood doesn't last forever, but apparently the wood of orange trees was an early top choice for toothpicks because it's a relatively hard wood and a relatively fine grain. So you don't get splinters that much, but also it holds up to toothpicking use. I think it's currently used for like cuticle things. Like if like there's a cuticle pusher.

thing that I think it's usually made out of orange wood, so it doesn't shove a splinter up your finger. That makes total sense, yeah. Yeah. It's a wonderful wood for doing things for our grooming. Yeah. The next number is a whole other innovation. It's the year 1842.

In 1842, an English inventor named John Sheldon Patton had a multi-tool featuring a toothpick. Hmm. A multitool is a name for stuff like Swiss Army Knives. If folks have heard our siff about Swiss Army knives, they might remember those started to get going in the 1880s as German Army knives and later for the Swiss military. So about 40 years before that, a guy came up with a four-function multi-tool where one of the functions was toothpicking. I think I'm looking at this. This is like a sort of a thing that looks a little bit like a pen. Yes, and it's almost mostly a pen.

The four functions are a fountain pen, a pencil, a toothpick, and then you could use it as a balancing postage scale. Whoa. For measuring very small weights. Okay. Which is the wildest to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he called this Sheldon's Pocket Companion.

Oh. Because there's no knife components, so you wouldn't call it a pocket knife. No. But this small metal rad that does four things, apparently this for me. remained a curiosity, partly because only four functions, two of which are writing, you might just keep having a few separate items instead of trying to make it all one thing. It's not entirely necessary, but is that the point? Yeah, I think just Swiss Army Knives hit a tipping point of people decided the silly,

overwhelming amount of things was worth it, and Sheldon wasn't there. I had access to a few Swiss Army knives when I was a kid. I think some were my dad's, maybe some were my grandpas, but there was one that had like a little toothpick that would come out. It was like a little plastic toothpick that was, there was like a little white square and then if you sort of there with a little notch and if you like tugged on it, little plastic toothpick came out of a tiny compartment. I had that too and it has become a common Swiss Army knife component. It wasn't one of the original design features, but they eventually had it. it. Yeah. And it's meant to be reusable because, you know, it's plastic. It's not like you can jam a wooden tooth pick up in that same little notch. So yeah, you just, I guess, wipe it off on your

jeans and shove it back in there. Yeah, I've always found that one kind of unsanitary, even though you could just wash it. But that gets us into our last number because the last number is 2017. 2017 is the year when a third-party company debuted a metal fire starter item meant to replace the toothpick in Swiss Army dives. It's sort of like a flint. You know, it's a piece of steel or actual flint that you strike and then it throws sparks. Can you also stick it in your teeth, though?

I guess. Because it's the same. Because it's the same size and shape. Right. As the exact toothpick that the Swiss R.B. Knife companies make. Right. So then you can use it to pick your teeth and then a little fire starts in your mouth. And then I'm a dragon.

And then I'm a dragon. Yes. And then you're a dragon there. It is. Yeah. Yeah, this popular mechanics covered this because in 2017, a company in California called Tortoisegear tried this as a Kickstarter page. And it was very popular immediately, which suggests most people don't like the toothpick part of the Swiss Army knife. Yeah. Because their premise is you're essentially discarding

the toothpick it comes with and replacing it with either a regular size or a mini size depending on your knife. The Firefly was the brand name, a tiny fire starter that you can then strike with any part of the knife and get sparks and start a fire. It's way more useful. Yeah, it's fire. Like if you're in a forest situation and it's like you're you're stranded in a forest. Toothpick would be fun, you know, to pick the toxic berries out from between your teeth. But yeah, fire might be a little better. I guess especially if you are starving because you don't have a fire to cook anything. Right.

You're not happy you have a toothpick for the no food. Right. Stuff. But you can look cool. Your corpse will look cool. Like with that toothpick dangling from your mouth, nonchalantly? Just like, yeah, I did die in the woods, but I was stylish doing it. My obituary says he was found looking as cool as chow Yun-fat in the movie Hard Boiled, directed by John Wu.

And mutilated by wolves. And I'm going to link the catalog of tortoise gear online because they now just sell it as a standard catalog item. It's apparently been a really. popular option to Swiss Army iPhoneers. Look at Alex over here in the pocket, a big flint. But yeah, and those are our numbers. Then we have a few big takeaways about these guys, starting with takeaway number one. Toothpicks have a long history as a dental hygiene tool and a recent history as a choking

hazard. Ah, I would have been, that would have been me chewing on my. meant toothpicks until they were a pulp. I never choked on them. Yeah, the real choking hazard is basically people swallowing entire toothpicks. Yeah, I never did that. That's good. It's truly dangerous.

Apparently, according to an analysis of medical journals, about 10% of the reported cases, the person dies. Oh, God. That's a... Because it punctures part of their intestine and things get bad. Oh, no. Yeah, that's terrible. That's terrifying. Yikes.

Although, I will say it seems a little difficult to swallow an entire toothpick. So, like, what, how does that work? I'll start there with the takeaway, because I don't want to just leave that out there. And key sources here are two features for the New York Times, one by Elizabeth S. Cullen and one by Denise Grady, and a piece for Ars Technica by writer Beth Moll. Also for the history of hygiene, we'll cite digital resources from the British Museum. The weird thing with toothpicks is way back in the day they would be relatively homemade or made by a local artisan. So it's lots of different shapes and sizes and often relatively big in a way where you're not going to choke on it and swallow the whole thing.

Yeah. And then we'll talk later about how toothpicks industrialized and became this standard little wooden item. But there are consistent cases of people occasionally swallowing an entire toothpick and risking death. The New York Times covered one in 2019, where in the end, the best theory they have is that this young college athlete guy ate a sandwich and ate the whole toothpick somehow. Oh, no. Oh, no. Which, it seems like you wouldn't, like when I read about this, I'm not worried because I think I'll just notice the toothpick in my entire thing. I mean. But it happens once in a while.

Yeah, I can kind of sympathize because, like, I've had fish before where I, there's like a fish bone and they get stuck in my throat. Yeah. I actually don't think they're very dangerous at all as long as they're like very thin fish bones because they are broken down easily by your stomach. So by the time they get to your intestines, they're very soft. The biggest hazard for the fish bone is going down the esophagus. And I once got it like stuck kind of behind a tonsil. And I was just like a cat for about an hour going like, and then your classmates are like, the Canadian student is in trouble.

Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah, this college athlete did not notice consuming an entire toothpick. With most of these cases, there's a really consistent set of symptoms. So I guess these are good to know. And again, we're not doctors. But he started feeling pain in the right lower part of his abdomen, followed by a sequence of fever, nausea, diarrhea. And then he was in and out doctor's offices for most of a month.

And then when he started showing signs of a really bad infection from somewhere in his body, that tipped them off to use scopes and look around inside. They found a toothpick in his intestinal wall, did emergency surgery to remove it and prevent him from bleeding out. and he survived. Okay, good. But it was from eating a sandwich, I guess, so aggressively that a whole toothpick went down his throat and everything. If he's a young guy and he's doing sports, like sometimes you have to devour a sandwich in such a... Yeah, yeah, they eat a lot. Violent way that a toothpick doesn't stand a chance of being noticed.

So, man, poor kid, I feel so, like these weird random, some of these like weird random medical things just makes me feel really bad for the person because it's like, man, that's just like so unlucky. That's the, yeah, it's extraordinarily unlucky and rare. Yeah, it's very, very rare. Yeah, but yeah, check your sandwiches, folks, for that for that like toothpick with the with the pimento olive on it, which I've literally never seen in real life and only. cartoons. Because then also, the Times covered in 2025, there was another one of these cases. And apparently, if there is a common swallow a whole toothpick situation, it is drunk people with a cocktail.

Oh, no. And, like, specifically the martini olive toothpick. Ah, right. You're like, you just down the whole thing and it's your several drink and the whole thing goes down. No. How? Gosh.

Right. You would think how. And so in 2025, a 36-year-old man in Massachusetts had those same symptoms as the athlete guy, and they eventually figured it out, and endoscopy found the whole toothpick in him, and they got it out, and he lived. Okay, good. But the Timesites and analysis of medical journals where they found 136 reported cases of this 13 fatalities, so slightly under 10%. Wow. Because just like a puncture in your intestines can infect, and you die, you know, like it's bad. there's probably a little bit of measurement issues because it's like there may be some cases

in which like the toothpick doesn't cause any symptoms so they just the person never knows that they've swallowed it totally yeah we can't say that toothpick swallowing has a 10% death rate because we don't know how many people are actually swallowing the toothpicks but still that's like shockingly shockingly deadly yeah i would think even just swallowing the hole would be closer to zero times ever. And like you said, 10% is probably the high end. There's probably unreported times it went okay. I had assumed that this would have been mostly children, right? Like sticking things in their mouth. But it's surprising to hear it seems to be mostly adults. It might be partly because adults have like bigger throats and bodies.

Because like maybe for a child it would get lodged in the throat first and then you'd catch it before it gets to the stomach. That's that's wild. Chew your food, everyone. Like, probably, you're probably in zero danger of swalling a toothpick, but it's always good to chew your food. I agree. I don't think we're, like, scaring listeners. It's just, like, astounding. No, no, no.

It is, yeah. Yeah, if you're, like, downing drinks, maybe just take the toothpicks out. Sure, yeah. Or the little plastic swords. I guess my advice to you while you're midbender. That's not going to help. Yeah. Yeah, or those little swords or the little umbrellas because that like if you swallow those little

umbrellas, it could like open up bright in your stomach and that's no good. Yeah, yeah, it's like opening a rain umbrella in a car or something. It's too tight. It's too tight in there. Don't do it. No, no, you don't do it. But yeah, and beyond that relatively modern weird problem, toothpicks and the related tool use of chewing sticks, actually have a long history as a positive element of dental

hygiene. With like the modern kind, you're generally discouraged by dentists to use it instead of floss. You know what I mean? It shouldn't be your primary way to get stuff out from between your teeth because we have nice floss now. There are also tools called interdental brushes that you can look up where it's sort of like a floss pick and a toothbrush combined. Yeah, I do have those mostly for the, like, power port of my cell phone, but I occasionally use them for my teeth when there's something real, real stubborn in there. Toothpicks are kind of in this family of, like, Q-tips and other items that can just go inside a small space.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the end of a paper clip. It's one of the things in that zone, yeah. If you use a toothpick once in a while, you're probably fine. But if you use it a lot, you could poker harm your gums. Also, if you keep picking at the same place forever, you could wear away the enamel on your teeth in that spot. So modern dental advice is that toothpicks are neutral or slightly negative.

But there's a long time history of people making chewing sticks in lots of cultures. And it's basically just a wooden stick or root or something from a plant that's good for it, where the person chews it around their mouth through their various teeth. and then that simple friction does a lot to remove stuff from between their teeth. We have much better things now. Don't pivot to that. I'm not telling to you to Ritz-a-Vern to that, but it's a thing that people have done across the centuries and millennia. Right. Like it was before we had specifically tested modern dental stuff and fluoride treatments and all the things and the really nice dentists. You know, can I just say I actually really enjoy

going to the dentist when you like have a good dental hygienist because yeah oh they're the best it's like it's like your teeth are so clean afterwards and it's like it's a little uncomfortable but it's something that's totally tolerable and it's like you're just like after i just feel like yeah that's i got that done my mouth is so nice and clean now all my teeth are smooth It's really nice. Like I, you know, obviously gnarly treatments kind of stuff, but yeah, I don't. I've, I know a lot of people are afraid of the dentist and get kind of squeamish about dental stuff. And I totally sympathize with that.

But yeah, it's, I kind of like it. It's like, you know, feels like kind of like a spa for your mouth. Yeah, thank a hygienist. Shout out to my current hygienist, Zach. Thanks, Zach. And also I had a previous hygiener. Atsi. They're both awesome. I hope they're doing great. Yeah. I'll see Zach later. So I'll tell him. But yeah. I've had many, many dental hygienists and only one bad one. And she was very funny.

Like she kept talking to me about random stuff that was like highly, highly sensitive and controversial political topics while hacking away at my teeth. And I couldn't say anything. It's extremely funny in retrospect. But yeah, at the time, I was not, I was not enjoying my. myself. With a part-time job, I briefly had a boss where I only worked for him for a few days, but one day he was like, you drink too much diet soda. And I was like, you know what, he's right. Maybe that's good health advice. But then the following day, he was like, you know, 9-11 is an inside job. And I was like, oh, I can disregard the soda advice. Cool. Great. Okay. Anyways, that was, and literally every single other dental hygienist I've had has been

a delight on an angel sent down to earth to clean my mouth. Yeah, having clean teeth feels amazing. Yes. That's part of tooth picking and chewing sticks being developed independently so many places. And just like the pure friction of the wood between your teeth can get stuff out from between them. And also it's like a pleasant habit as a secondary benefit. So across a lot of cultures in particular in North Africa and West Asia and South Asia, there are big chewing stick traditions where you chew on one end.

and then the firm other end can be a toothpick still. They have both options. And those regions, North Africa, West Asia, South Asia are home to a tree that's particularly good for this. A scientific name Salvadora Persica, one of its nicknames is the toothbrush tree. Apparently it's debated how much actual antibacterial properties the wood has, but either way, it just feels nice as a chewing stick. And maybe the most famous user of one of those is the Prophet Muhammad. the founder of Islam. It's like, again, like the same thing with like the king stuff.

Like I, I, the idea of this like very important historical figure with like a toothpick casually and coolly hanging out of its mouth is just very interesting to me. In Arabic, these sticks are often called a miswalk. And so Muhammad had a servant specifically assigned to maintain and provide miswalks for him. And then in some English translations, the servant has been called the master of the toothpick. Because it was just an important and useful tool for life and also comfort. It's not really like a small toothpick. It's like a big branch that naturally has a bunch, like sort of like a brush type thing on the end.

And then you can kind of like scrub your teeth with it. It's like a hybrid between a toothpick and a toothbrush. Yeah. And so people have really innovated this. There's a lot more to toothpick history than just the current thing. Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, we made it this far with all of our teeth rotting out of our heads.

Amazingly, yeah. Right, somehow. And then going beyond health, we have another takeaway here about modern toothpicks. Because takeaway number two. Toothpick art is a thriving medium. and saved a prisoner from the torment of solitary confinement. Oh, cool. There's two different styles of toothpick art to talk about,

and then the story of artist Billy Burke. Yeah. Who might have basically lost his mind in solitary confinement in fulsome prison, if not for the magic of toothpick art. Hot take. I think I don't agree with solitary confinement. I think it's, I think it counts as cruel and unusual punishment, and I just don't, I think if you're already in prison, honestly, you could be a horrible, horrible person.

And I still don't think that we should torture people this way. It's just not, it's not cool. It's like we don't, we're not supposed to torture people. And solitary confinement, like, I've actually read, like, psychology studies on it. And it's torture. It's a form of torture. Yeah. And so this guy basically had his life saved by having the outlet of making toothpick.

guard in Folsom and not continuing to try to escape and continuing to get thrown in inhumane old-timey solitary confinement. Yeah. Inhumane either way, but especially then. Yeah. Key Source here is an amazing feature about Billy Burke for Alice Obscura by writer Lauren Young. And then we're also linking a New York Times piece and a story from WGN News Chicago about other artists.

Now that we have industrialized and standardized wooden toothpicks, that's exciting as artistic material. Yeah. The viewer knows exactly what it's made out of and then is amazed by the result. Kind of like popsicle sticks. Yeah. Toothpick stuff, popsicle stick stuff. Yeah.

It's just fun. It's like here's this thing that we all know and recognize and you make incredible structures out of it. And it turns out in modern toothpick art, there are actually two schools of what's the most amazing to make to either make the biggest thing you can make or to go as small in miniature as you can. A big art, one amazing example, is by a Chicago artist named Wayne Cousie, who builds giant models from toothpicks. His most famous piece is probably a model of the Titanic.

Incredible. It's 10 feet long, which is a little over 3 meters, made of 75,000 toothpicks. I mean, it's got colors on it. Is he, like, is he using any other materials other than toothpicks, or is it, like, dyed toothpicks? I couldn't find whether they're painted or dyed or just bought that way. But on his site, he claims that it's just 75,000 toothpicks and one gallon of Elmer's glue. I find the glue amount too small, honestly, but he apparently pulled it off with just one gallon. Incredible.

Yeah. He looks very proud. He should be. A huge model of the Titanic. Like, it is... It's so big. It's as big as like an actual boat. Like a small fisher boat.

Yeah, 10-footer. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's crazy. Another amazing artist is Stephen Backman, who's based in New York. He makes giant models. He made a model of the Empire State Building that is made of 7,470 toothpicks. It's 28 inches tall, which is over 71 centimeters. And then Backman got a little bit.

He felt like he'd grown beyond making big models. And he said, what if I experiment in totally the other direction? And he has begun making amazing detailed models out of one toothpick. Oh, wow. Chopped up subdivided reassembled. Oh, my goodness. Then it's like tooth splinters. Yes.

Like he says that he has very steady hands and also has excellent vision. He claims he has 2015 eyesight. I don't know if that's actually literally possible. Is it? I don't know. Can someone tell me, optometrist? And also he's a cookie tooth. toothpick artists, so I don't know.

Right. But I mean, like, the little tiny sculptures, the proof is in the pudding. These are incredible. Yeah, he uses tiny razor blades extreme focus to take just one toothpick and chop and rearrange all the little parts. And apparently he's even more proud of an Empire State building he made out of one toothpicks wood than he is of the 7,000 plus toothpick one. He's right about that because that to me is. actually more impressive.

Like, that's... It's so cool. Because it's very tiny. It's like smaller than a pinky nail tiny. I don't even know how you do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's wild. And I never even imagine going that direction.

He's done a lot of... He's done the White House. It's got like a spaceship. The Golden Gate Bridge. Incredible. It's a whole world. It's so great. Yeah.

And then one last toothpick art story to do is the story of a guy named Billy Burke. Right. And my theory about him is he's simply a very overactive person rather than intending to be a criminal. Right. He was born in 1909 in Southern California, and he committed so many small crimes such as petty theft, snatching coin boxes, cracking the safes in businesses when the owners weren't looking, that before he turned 19, he was sentenced to prison and sent to Folsom. I mean, that's said earlier. I don't even think. the worst or the worst deserve to be tortured because I just don't think as a society we should be doing torture. But certainly not this kid. Yeah, because the other thing then is he wasn't

going to be there that long, but he ultimately was there 23 years total because he could not stop trying to escape. I mean, I think there are certain countries where trying to escape from prison is not a crime because it's seen as a very like a human impulse like breathing and eating where it's like of course human being is naturally going to try to escape it's not a crime to try to escape prison but you do you have to catch them and put them back you just don't add to their sentence when they do that yeah and the United States didn't roll that way and probably still doesn't because he he he tried all kinds of digging holes and tunnels.

He built a hot air balloon full of gas from the sewers of the prison. I don't want a stereotype, but it sounds like he may have had a bit of ADHD and also was like an undiscovered, talented maker. I agree, because within about a year being sent to Folsom, he successfully escaped. Nice. Good for him. A lot of his escapes involved putting dummies in his bed To make it seem like he was there while he did other stuff Nice, the classic Bueller The Bueller

He learned that from Ferris Bueller And so one of his dummy setups He managed to sneak out of his cell Because I guess they like opened a gate Because they thought he was asleep looked away, he got out Then he sneaks down some stairs And into the prison morgue hides in a coffin.

Whoa. Waits till there's like not very many staff or something, which gives him the chance to sneak through the prison yard around a guard tower, over a wall, and into a canal to freedom. Incredible. He broke out of Folsom with like no threats or weapons. This guy's like a genius. And then what happened is he was recaptured within two months of escape

because he kept committing so many small crimes that people in Philadelphia where he got into all the way across the United States just like eventually wanted to track him down and they sent him back to Folsom. It's clearly a compulsion. It's something where it's like this is not. It's not a murderer or something. No, no. He's not a violent, evil guy.

He's just he's got a compulsion. Yeah. And then as he proceeded to repeat. He knew escape attempts when he was back in fulsome. They started punishing him with solitary confinement. Now they might give you writing material or light, but he was just in a dark box all on his own. And it's, you know, it's likely he would have gone nuts or died.

Well, yeah, yeah. There's like a lot of research that shows very high rates of self-harm among people who are subjected to solitary confinement. It's a thing. And the one lucky thing is that apparently a new warden at Folsom, his name was Clyde Plummer, basically just started to get the sense that, hey, this guy just seems to like have a lot of energy. I don't think he's like, I think he just needs somewhere to put his energy. Right. And so Plummer realized there was an empty basement area of the prison where they could just put Burke under supervision to make stuff or build stuff. And hope, like, maybe he'll put his energy there and we can stop having to try to catch him and stop him all the time. Right, right. Give him something to do. He needs something to do with his hands.

He just needs to be doing something. That's all he needs. And one of the few things lying around fulsome prison that nobody was precious about, nobody minded losing is ordinary toothpicks. And Burke immediately starts building carnivals out of toothpicks. Ferris wheels, roller coasters, airplane rides. He also started requesting so many toothpicks. A lot of the prison staff thought it was some kind of escape scheme that they just didn't understand. But this warden, like, push to give him the toothpicks anyway. It's like, wait, he needs the toothpicks, or he will escape. Exactly, yeah.

He will either escape or go crazy. Like, you need the toothpicks. Like, I think the rest of the staff was like, does he build a human catapult very slowly? something like what's the plot but it was just to be busy like an iron man suit made out of toothpicks right and yeah eventually he built a couple of gigantic carnivals just filling this unused basement space the biggest section was 24 feet long more than seven meters made from a quarter million toothpicks. Wow.

And he even made tiny toothpick versions of patrons and fairgoers of the carnival. He also started repurposing motors from small gadgets to motorize some of the rides and make them move. That's my God. Definitely a genius. This is, I'm looking at this. It's not like something that's like a rough approximation of something like a Ferris wheel where it's like, you know, sort of like you could maybe make, if he's,

spent enough time on this is like it shows like an engineering prowess that is like he built an entire scaffolding for the roller coaster he built all he built a ferris wheel that has all of the struts and the the necessary like these are miniature versions of kind of the engineering you'd have to do to make the larger versions it's it is how does like did he have any access to like Images of this stuff. How did he even figure out how to do this? Great question. Apparently he just loved carnivals and missed them.

My God. Maybe somebody gave him visual aids, but it doesn't sound like it was crucial. My God. It's, I can't, it's like so hard to, to even fathom this. It is. And he just did that, stop trying to escape, started to end his sentence. Right. I went in shortly before turning 19, got out in his 40s, and then he made a living as a janitor and maintenance worker stopped doing tiny crimes.

He married, had four kids, and also kept building carnivals. Wow. It was just his passion after getting out. He would go to a fair, build the carnival for free, and then sell them the carnival in exchange for enough money to travel back home. Incredible. I mean, this is what happens when you like. When someone young and troubled is like, have you tried a hobby? Like, can we help you find your hobby and your calling rather than just stick you in a dark room and let you rot there?

Yeah, more than any story I've ever heard, this is just you need to find them a thing to do. Yeah. And they'll stop acting out. Like, that's it. Especially someone who's doing, like, it's a young, like a kid, right? Like a 19-year-old kid who's doing crimes. It's like, yeah, like he needs a non-violent. non-sociopathic crimes just like a bunch of sort of slight of hand thievery. It's like, yeah,

give him a hobby. It's the 1920s. There's nothing to do. Right. And he's just kind of stir crazy. Like, that's it. He's not a bad guy. Yeah. So, yeah, and there's pictures in the Atlas of Gerefeature. Also, more you can Google that this guy, Billy Burke, is maybe the most amazing toothpick artist of all time. It's so cool. If crochet catches on among men, I think crime will. draw precipitously. Folks, that's two big takeaways in our numbers. We're going to take a short break,

then tell the whole story of modern toothpicks across three continents. We're back, and we're back with takeaway number three. The first last, large-scale toothpick-making business was Portuguese nuns supporting their own candy business. So you use the toothpick business to support your candy business, which you use to support your armory that you're building as warriors for Christ.

And then we conquer Portugal. Right. And they all start cheering in Portuguese. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. People have just made toothpicks either in an artisanal way or on the spot forever. This is really the first company that sold toothpicks is like a product at some scale. It was in Portugal in the 1500s. It was nuns.

And the key source is amazing writing by Dr. Henry Petroski, who is a professor of both civil engineering and history at Duke University and a prolific nonfiction author on topics of everyday things if you like the show. You like his stuff. It's great. He said that in the 1500s, there was a group of a few hundred Cistercian nuns living in Coimbra in the Mondego River Valley. And in order to raise money to support their abbey, their convent, they started making candy. And it turns out this is part of a longtime Portuguese tradition of what are called Dusaria Conventual, which means sweets from a conventual. because what would happen is local people would donate their extra eggs to the nuns

and then the nuns would use the eggs three ways they would eat some of them then they would separately use the whites and the yulks the whites helped them starch and stiffen and whiten their clothing or ceremonial altar cloth kind of stuff and then they'd combine the yulks with sugar and almonds to make candy and that is to this day a style of candy in Portugal Would that be sort of like a meringue candy?

Like how do you use the yolks to make candy? Yeah, there's a bunch of ways, but it is meringuey or sticky, yeah. And then as they sold more and more of this, they found that their customers spent a lot of time picking this, like, sticky candy residue off of their teeth. Right. Maybe just with their fingernails or their own random toothpick. Keeps them quiet during mass.

Oh. But the hymns, oh, the hymns suffer. The hymns, you can't. Just humming through most of them. And so the nuns said, hey, we could start making excellent toothpicks and sell them with the candy because it's handy for this almost carmally kind of candy to just get it off, you know. Yeah, yeah. And also, Portugal is a good place for citrus trees, such as orange trees and orange wood. And then the nuns did that thing that a lot of monastic.

groups kind of do where they'll just spend a bunch of time getting awesome at the thing. So the nuns made incredibly beautiful and intricate practical toothpicks. That's what happens when you don't have TVs or screens. Right. You do crimes and end up in Folsom or you become a Portuguese Catholic nun. You know, is there such a difference? There are two TV-less people inside of you. Right. Yeah. So that made like Portuguese.

Portuguese nun toothpicks relatively famous across Europe, and especially in the country. And then that also kind of invented the idea of a toothpick business rather than just being a made-to-order item once in a while. Right. And then that story gets us into our final takeaway number four. Almost all of U.S. toothpick culture comes from one scam in Boston. This is the story of a guy named Charles Forster. who basically made toothpick use common across the entire United States by tricking everyone in Boston into thinking it was common.

Interesting. To sell his own toothpicks. He hired local people and actors to trick businesses. Oh my gosh. That's so funny. So he hired people to have like toothpicks hanging out of their mouths so that people would be like, oh, this is something you should do. Yeah, he did that.

He hired people to ask the restaurant for a toothpick. and get mad when they didn't have one. Wow. Incredible. Just enormous gaslighting and lying across all of Boston. That's incredible. That's like that, I kind of have to respect that level of grift. If it were for something besides a toothpick business, it would be evil.

But it's a toothpick business. So it's whatever. Well, yeah. First toothpicks and then nuclear weapons. Yeah, he like astroturfed toothpicks. that's the only reason they're popular here well that's i mean you know now we have so much insidious advertisement where it's meant to seem like i'm one of you i'm just a regular twitter user or reddit user hey weirdly enough i've mentioned this product a lot yeah so you know we have this

all the time but it just the idea of like a bunch of actors roving around making it seem like Toothpick use. It's like a Nathan for you bit. It's total Nathan for you stuff. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And the sources here are Henry Petrosky and then also an amazing feature for Atlas Obscura by writer George Pendle, who visited Charles Forster's former Toothpick Factory in a town called Strong in the state of Maine. Charles Forster was born in 1826. And I said before the break that we'd cover three continents, Charles Forster's first job was working for his uncle in an import-export business that mainly dealt with Brazil. And he noticed that a lot of people he encountered in Brazil had beautiful teeth.

They attributed it to their handcrafted toothpicks and chewing sticks. This is the Portuguese nuns, their colonial influence through Portugal into Brazil, combined with existing chewing stick practices of native people. That's what Forster was seeing, something partly sparked by the Portuguese nuns. So, like, from Portugal to Brazil to this guy from Massachusetts, he says, I love industrialization. I'm going to, like, standardize the toothpick and make a fortune. Right. The problem was that nobody used toothpics. Almost, like, it was specifically that, like, the Yankee New England tradition was to whittle your own toothpick on demand.

I see. And it was also not as common, yeah, yeah. So people either just made their own or didn't do it. And he said, oh, I need to like invent a culture of using the product that I have begun mass producing. Oops, I need to invent customers. Right, right. There's supply. There's no demand.

So I must hire actors to make it seem like there's demand. Yeah, apparently he had already partnered with guys who were making shoe pegs. That's like a wooden peg that puts together the soles and bottoms of shoes. If you've ever seen like old dress shoes where there's a bunch of little peg marks on the bottom, it's that. But he had partnered with those guys to set up a production facility to use white birch trees in central Maine to make a bunch of toothpicks. But then he said, oh, no, I don't have a market. And so he starts gaslighting everyone in Boston. His first move was to hire personable young people to go to stores,

and ask for wooden toothpicks. And then they would go and ask for the toothpicks right before Forster would come as a door-to-door salesman with his toothpicks. So then the shop owner would say, yeah, people were just asking me about this product. But it was all like completely 100% faked. When I was in Vegas, there was like a guy trying to sell oxygen, which sounds like a parody. but it was like an oxygen bar where you like inhale concentrated oxygen, which he was saying is supposed to like make you feel good.

And then he was offering us to like pay us to sit at this oxygen bar and like huff oxygen for an hour or so. I was like, why would you pay like if your product's good, why would you pay us to do it? And he's like, because you look nice. And I want people to like want to come to the auction because you look like nice, friendly people. And I want people to come. So like I got to get some people to come to my oxygen bar to like pretend like they're having a good time. Yeah, turning people into advertisements was his whole move.

Wild. And like there were so many approaches and layers to this. Because with the shop owner scam, like he hires the people to ask for the product. Then he walks in and offers to sell it. And then once he left, he would have new young people come to the store to ask for wooden toothpicks and buy those. And then those people would give the boxes back to Forster so he could resell them to the retailer. Wow. A 100% artificial loop of demand and purchase of the toothpicks.

You got to respect that level of grip. That's so, that's incredible. Yeah, and then the next grift here was with restaurants. Forster went to the campus of Harvard. Oh, yeah. And then he would hire Harvard men. He would say, here's enough money to buy a giant luxurious meal at a restaurant. All you need to do is ask for wooden toothpicks after the meal.

And when the restaurant tells you, we of course don't have that product no one uses, you need to raise a ruckus, you need to vow to never eat there ever again. I am insulted. I like make a huge scene while being dressed nicely and acting like a future captain of industry. Right. Her rump, I from Harvard am insulted by your lack of small wooden things to stick in my teeth.

Yes. And then Forster would just come to that restaurant a day or two later offering to sell wooden toothpicks. And then he would- How did nobody be like, the timing of this is so suspicious. I've never had anyone make a fuss over toothpicks. And then two days later, some guy, like, comes over, is like, you want to buy some toothpicks? There's so many, like, crisis actors in this scheme.

I think nobody just conceived that that's what's happening, you know? Yeah. It's too elaborate. The Alex Jones of this time is absolutely losing it. Yeah, yeah. And that Forster would just try to get this. loop going in a restaurant enough where they start making them readily available at like the hostess station or out front. And then what happened is diners started picking these up. And then Forster

had less of an active hand in this, but basically he got people going on a trend of chewing toothpicks as a mark of I was rich enough to eat inside of the building I'm in front of. Oh, wild. If I'm using a toothpick outside of the finest restaurant in Boston, I'm clearly a rich enough dude to eat there, and you a lady should accept my offer of dates. See this toothpick in my mouth? Yeah, I've just had food in there. Wink, wink, wink. Food I paid money for, wink, wink.

Exactly. And so, like, then in the mid, especially 1860s and 1870s, there starts. to be a trend of masculine American toothpick chewing, as either a mark of wealth or status or like rakishness. Right. Mark Twain describes as soon as he started to be more of a steamboat captain guy in his book life on the Mississippi, he describes starting to cock his cap and quote, wear a toothpick as a mark of like, I'm a masculine, well-to-do man now.

I should have a toothpick. It's an accessory like a luboo. Almost. It is an oral luboo for men. An oral lupubu is not a sentence. I love to hear, but accurate. Yeah, they have teeth, you have teeth, you know. True enough. After a bunch of active fraud and intervention by Forster, this spins up into a trend in the influential city of Boston, then the East Coast, then the whole United States. and Forster also mass-produces tons of toothpicks, builds his real big facility in the town of Strong and Maine in 1887.

That business went so well, a bunch of competitors popped up there too, and at one point 95% of all wooden toothpicks in the United States were from central Maine. Wow. And shortly after World War II at their peak, they were producing over 75 billion toothpicks in Maine per year. That's a lot of beavers hard at work there. Yeah. And then this trend also started to become dated where after World War II, there starts to be more nylon dental floss, also cheap toothpicks from outside the United States. And according to George Pendle's piece for Atlas Obscira, quote, picking one's teeth at the table became something of a social faux pas, something your rough and ready grandfather might do, end quote. The kids of the World War II generation started saying, that's old people stuff.

Right. But it took a long time. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's a little gross to pick your teeth at the dinner table because then where does that? The question is, where does the little piece of food go? Where does it go? Yeah. Like, I guess ideally you swallow it, but otherwise you're like, boop.

Yeah. Put it somewhere. Or like it gets flicked, like Trebby Shade. Right? Totally. Charles Forster's phenomenon was a huge business for more than a century in Maine. Apparently, the last toothpick factory in Strong closed down in 2003. So now most Americans get a foreign toothpick or some kind of specific flavored artisanal toothpick, like the mint ones from a special thing.

But like the entire habit at all was this guy pretending it's a habit. Incredible. And lying all over Boston. Wow. Like if you think stuff like Labuboos, like, oh, this is dumb, modern stuff, it's a sign that the younger generations are just hopeless and stuff. It's like, no, man, this is time immemorial, immemortal, time forever, forever time. We've had various versions of trends like this and often astro-turfed. I want a Labibu investigation because the trend blew up.

up on TikTok, and the Lububu is almost exclusively sold through TikTok. Yeah. So that could that could be one of these. There's a lot of there. I mean, this is like, there's a lot of like influencer led like, I mean, this, the toothpick story was like early influencers where it's like, I'm going to get some guys from Harvard that have and make them, you know, that seems like, ah, these are important people and their opinions matter and then I'll have them like eat at a restaurant.

Like this is all influencer stuff. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just 100% making it a thing by pretending it's a thing. Yeah, until it is a thing. Yeah. So that's probably why anybody in your American family uses toothpicks.

Because again, they're a global item, Portugal, and Portuguese colonies got into them. But Forster brought it over from Portuguese, Brazil. Right. And incredible. Anyway, or a babou-to-you-all and goodbye. Oh, why, Alex? I post as the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode

with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, toothpicks have a long history as a dental hygiene tool and a recent history as a choking hazard. Takeaway number two, toothpick art is a thriving medium and saved a prisoner from the torment of solitary confinement. That prisoner's name, Billy Burke. Takeaway number three, the first large-scale business for making toothpicks was created by Portuguese nuns in the 1500s to support their own candy business. Takeaway number four, almost all

of U.S. toothpick culture comes from one scam in Boston. Charles Forster, inspired by Portuguese Brazil, gaslit and influenced all of Boston in the mid-1800s. And then a bunch of numbers about the millions of years of

humans picking their teeth, the many ways we've gone about it, the most luxurious toothpicks ever described or painted, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now

if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is three notorious and alleged toothpick deaths. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of almost 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows.

It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun. dot org. Key sources this week include the writing of Dr. Henry Petroski, professor of history, and professor of civil engineering at Duke University. One of his books is titled The Toothpick, Technology, and Culture. He also touches on toothpicks in his many other books about design and objects. Also citing a piece for the Pennsylvania Gazette, they interview Stephen Potashnik,

who is a toothpick collector and has created a whole photo gallery book of amazing toothpicks across history. Also citing a couple of amazing features for Atlas Obscira, one by writer Lauren Young and another by writer George Pendle, and then further journalism from the New York Times, WGN Channel 9, Chicago, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoek people, and others.

Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Charles Forster built his key toothpick factory in the whole U.S. business on the traditional land of the Abinaki people and the Dawnland Confederacy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, strong mains location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 215. That's about the Mona Lisa. Fun fact there, the Mona Lisa hung in the Louvre long before that was an art museum, back when it was a French royal palace it was there. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more.

Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Boudos band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back

next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.