The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Hot Dog Sports, Sexy Pseudoscience, Intestinal Power Walking

Episode Date: September 16, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a beetle that can waltz through frog intestines unscathed, to the a man who thought he could capture sexual energy in a cage. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. I'm Hannah Seo. Hannah, welcome to the show.

Hannah is currently one of our interns at Popular Science, and we are so thrilled to have her on as a guest. Yeah, happy to be here. Longtime listener, long-time weird fact collector. Yeah, I'm excited. Amazing. All right, so on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease

about some kind of fact that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Claire, why don't you start with your teas? Yes, I would love to. I would like to talk about a beetle that can once swallowed by a frog, it can force itself out of the frog's digestive system alive. I love that. And I love digestive health, and so I'm just very jealous of this Beatles ability. You would love to have that level of control.

Correct. Yeah, I can relate to that. Also, I just love it's such a thriving on spite kind of defense mechanism. Yeah, totally. It's like I'm not dying today. Not today. Hannah, how about your tease? Okay, my tease is one scientist thought he had discovered the cosmic source of all sexual energy.

Oh. Oh. That's pretty big for him. his riches, but can't wait to hear more. Yeah, big claim. Well with true, as they say. My tease is that, you know, we've talked about the four-minute mile on weirdest thing. We've talked about the two-hour marathon, but I'm here to talk about another athletic feat, which is eating 84 hot dogs in 10 minutes. Oh my goodness. I'm so excited for this. All right. So what do we want to start with? Hot dogs. All right. I will not, I can't deny Claire. I will begin. So in July, this veterinarian and

sports scientist themed James Smoliga decided to analyze competitive eating the same way he and other researchers have always analyzed other competitive sports, which is plotting out how performance has improved over time and trying to figure out what peak performance looks like. And Claire, as you probably know from all of the writing you've done on the four minute mile, which we talked about in a couple weirdest thing episodes. I think our episode on competitive walking and our episode about the first Olympic marathon. In most sports, you see things start out pretty amateurish, as was the case with the marathon you described in one of our past episodes. Because, you know, when a sport is new to the scene, there are no elite athletes around. for it. And so then people start actually training more and more people become aware of the

sport. So just like the pool of potential competitors gets bigger. And that leads to kind of a slow and steady increase in performance. But then what happens is that so now there are people who are good enough that people want to like watch the sport and care about it. So there start being incentives to be really good. There start being, you know, prizes to win and glory and all of that. And so that motivates folks to start cracking the code on techniques and training regimens that really help them excel. So then after that kind of slow, slope and plateau, you see a big uptick in performance. And that eventually levels off as we approach the limits of what the human body can do. And of course, there is lots of debate about, you know, what the inherent human limits are for any sport.

but unless humans basically like turn themselves into a whole new species, there are just like things the body will never be able to do. Speeds will not be able to reach and things like that. And it turns out that is also what happened with competitive eating, which I don't know why I find this so satisfying that I really do. So to talk about the findings, I will get into a little bit of background. So county fairs often had pie eating contest or other competitive eating contests that were that vibe. It wasn't really about eating an absurd amount of food. It was a pretty casual competition. The kind of OG competitive eating contest, as we know it today, is the Nathan's hot dog eating contest in Coney Island, Brooklyn, which fun fact was long said to have started in the early 1900s and had this very,

a trite origin story about a group of immigrants arguing over who is the most patriotic and deciding they would prove it by trying to eat the most hot dogs at once. But then somebody admitted to that having been a total fabrication and probably the contest, as we know, it actually kicked off in the 70s, at least in terms of being a yearly organized thing. Basically, you have some number of minutes. It's now 10, but it's varied over the years to consume as many hot dogs as possible. And that's the gist of it. And you don't have to eat the buns, right? It's just the hot dogs. You do have to eat the buns, but there is a common form of cheating called Julietting, where you throw the bun behind you and hope no one notices. I learned a lot today.

Originally, as is the case for all new sports, it was something anyone off the street could do. And unsurprisingly, it attracted large men who knew they liked to eat a lot. They were like, I would be good at eating many hot dogs because I habitually eat many things. So for decades, that's who was mostly competing. And even once it became more varied, the winners were eating like maybe a dozen hot dogs in the time frame in most years. As of 2001, the world record was 25.5 hot dogs. And then everything changed. This Japanese competitive eater named Takeru Kobayashi showed up and literally doubled the record.

He ate 50 hot dogs. The world did not know what to do with that. It was the kind of seismic leap that people who study the limits of human performance in sport dream of. It was really just changed the game. And so that was around the same time that the major league eating organization was coming about. And we just started to see with Kobayashi's huge, huge record break, an increasing number of competitive eaters who followed trick training regimens and came up with these novel eating techniques. So that brings me back to the research paper. Nathan's has reportedly not changed the size or composition of its hot dogs in its 104-year history.

That's why they're so good. And so Smoliko was able to standardize results from the last 39 years of competition to chart performance trends, which is just really cool that that data that existed and that he thought to use it. Apparently, he was just inspired watching the latest round of competition and thought it would be. a cool question to explore. So according to that analysis, he says hot dog eating has reached that major plateau where we've seen the big surge from people coming in and figuring out how to optimize the sport. And there's just not that much more that can be done to increase our physical capacity. So the current record is 75 hot dogs, which is held by Joey Jaws chestnut and was just set this year. and Smoliga suspects that the physical limit is around 84 hot dogs and that it would take someone particularly tall and lean to hit that maximum mark.

So what's interesting about the limit is that Smoliga and other experts agree that it's the chewing and swallowing that's the limiting factor. It's not about your stomach filling up. Claire, you might remember we have this video on stomach expansion, which I'll share on popsight.com slash weird. but the gist of it is that your stomach, when it's empty, isn't even big enough to hold a whole can of soda. It gets bigger as you eat, but it's not because the food is stretching it like a balloon. The stomach is full of these little folds called Rugei, and your nerves and hormones signal them to unfurl when you're about to eat. It's the expectation and anticipation of food that makes your stomach expand. And so then as the space fills up with food, nerves signal to your brain that you should.

stop eating. So while there are a handful of cases of people rupturing their stomachs in like an acute way by eating too much, it's very, very hard to do, though please don't try. But you can train your stomach to have a higher maximum capacity, which is what a lot of these competitive eaters do. Often they'll do things like drinking tons of water or eating like high volume, low calorie foods, like very light soups. Or some of them talk about eating like entire. heads of cabbage followed by a gallon of water. That sounds really painful. Yeah, I don't want to do it at all. And they can also, so by training their stomachs to expand more, they can also delay how long it takes their brains and bodies to start rebuking food, which is it really does become a mental game

when you're getting into these like really elite high numbers. And this is also why some competitors swear by meditation and breathing exercises because so much of it is just about overriding your instinct to stop eating. You know, it's like, it's so, it's such an insane and intense world of competition. Some people will also jump around or shimmy to speed up the process of getting food to move through the digestive system. Another interesting thing I found is that there's a widely held belief that having more abdominal fat actually limits your stomach's ability to expand to full capacity. And that's why so many

competitive eaters train and diet to stay quite slim, even while they're stretching their stomachs, which is why you hear so much about people doing things like eating entire heads of cabbage, very high volume, low calorie. This sounds like all of the difficulties of like getting fit with none of the good parts. Exactly. I 100% agree. And, you know, I do think that, you know, know, people, a lot of the people in the competitive eating world do seem to really appreciate food in certain settings. But I think to be really elite, you have to just learn how to shovel it down, which is very different from enjoying food. So there happened several deaths due to competitive eating, but back to the point of where the limits are, all seem to be due to choking,

not stomach ruptures. So it's really where our limit is is mostly like how quickly we can swallow this stuff. And you will see people, a lot of the techniques people have is for swallowing the food as quickly as possible without choking. There's a method called the Solomon technique where you split the hot dog in half so that you can shove the two shorter ends of hot dog in your mouth at the same time. and then you'll see people doing a lot with water to try to like basically like make them to like soak the hot dog buns and then ball them up to try to make them easier to swallow. But you know, it is very dangerous if you're jumping into this with no training and you definitely need to be careful to not choke.

And of course, straining your stomach repeatedly and over time can lead to all sorts of health problems. You can see ulcers and you know, you can per se. for your stomach, it's just unlikely to happen due to like one bout of intense eating. But, you know, if you're kind of turning your stomach, which is this very tight little organ that is great at expanding, if you're kind of forcing it to be fully expanded all the time, you know, you're just asking for trouble. And there really hasn't been enough research for us to fully understand the potential repercussions because there are only so many people trying to eat as many hot dogs as they can in 10 minutes. Also, just one note for anyone who is tempted

by this episode, one of the most widely touted training methods, which is guzzling tons of water, can absolutely kill you because water intoxication is a thing. Drinking too much water, which can be, you know, as little as a couple gallons at a time, it can throw your body's electrolytes out of whack and like literally keep your brain from functioning. So please don't do that. Even if you want to become a competitive eater, be smart. So yeah, really just a fascinating world and just a great key study in kind of the trajectory of the human adoption and mastery of a new sport. This reminds me of that there is a good, great, I'm really, I've been watching the first 10 seasons of Grey's Anatomy, which are the only 10, the only seasons of Grace Anatomy anyone should

watch, but there's an episode where there was a competitive eater that apparently got like an esophageal tear because she was eating too much, you know, at once or whatever you're saying with like the stomach tears or whatnot. But anyway, yes, this is very fascinating. I'm curious as to if you're saying that it was like 70 something is the limit now and these researchers say that 80 something is like our human capacity limit. What is stopping us from getting to those last 10? Do you think it's like mind over matter or I don't know. Now that this paper has come out, I bet you like the next person,

next year's competition is going to eat like one more hot dog than that paper says the limit exists or something like that. Yeah, I would not be surprised. So definitely the records are still being broken pretty regularly. It's just that like the. intervals by which they're being broken are getting smaller, you know, for a few years when right after Kobayashi first won, he won like several years in a row and every year, you know, broke his own record by like more than one hot dog. And that was just kind of the,

even once he wasn't the person winning every year, that was the way it went for a few years. And now it's slower. So like we have every indication that maybe it's just a mental thing. And if people can just get that one more hot dog a minute, like gradually over the next few years we'll get there. The researcher did suggest that somebody particularly tall and slim. So again, there isn't so much evidence backing up the idea that it's called like the fat belt theory, which is that, you know, if you have more fat around your abdomen, that like physically keeps the stomach from expanding. But I guess it is pretty widely accepted now that if, you're slimmer but well-trained.

That's kind of the optimum competitive eating physique. And he also suggested that it would probably be a pretty tall person, I guess just thinking in terms of like relative size of abdominal capacity. And he has said that, you know, based on his numbers, of course, this is all mathematical modeling. But he thinks that to get beyond 85 hot dogs, someone would have to have like a specific metabolic or physical anomaly that made them the perfect competitive eater. So if someone was like seven feet tall and had an unusually large

stomach even relative to their height and like food moved faster through their digestive system than the average person and they trained to become an elite competitive eater, maybe they could get above 85 hot dogs. So yeah, I guess the answer, Claire, is that we just haven't tried hard enough yet. And people just need to eat more. At five, two and a half, I will never break the world record of hot dog eating. And I'm okay with that. I'm totally fine with that. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Claire, how about we continue with digestion and you share your fact. Yes, I would love to. I'm hoping that this somehow competes with eating 70-something hot dogs in 10 minutes, but we'll see. So as many of you a long time

weirdest thing listeners know, I'm usually consider myself on the weird health beat topic. But since the pandemic started, I've been thinking way too much about human beings. bodily functions and I just couldn't fathom giving myself a hypochondriac moment when going to the doctor is, you know, not something you want to do for no reason these days. So I didn't want to stray too far away from the beat that I love most. So I found a sort of hybrid, a weird bodily function of insects and frogs. Now, I came across this fact as I was looking for a upcoming science stories for our wonderful science team to write. And unfortunately, some more pressing issues took precedence like the coronavirus. But this was just too good to pass up. So I

decided to share it with you all here. So this tale starts with a researcher named Sunji Suji Goa, who is a biologist at Kobe University in Japan. And he noticed, that a particular species of beetle and frogs tend to hang out together at least a majority of the time on some paddy fields in Japan. And at the same time, he also knew that frogs tend to eat beetles for food. So he thought it was strange that these two species seem to coexist together and both the beetle and the frog thrived. So he took both of them and put them in a lab where he could essentially watch them at his

leisure. And unsurprisingly, the frogs did try and succeeded at capturing the beetles and swallowing them. But strangely, after as little as six minutes later, the frogs would poop and the beetles would emerge very much alive and thriving. And I'm guessing that six minutes after eating is a, that seems like a quick poop time. Yes. It did range from six minutes to six hours, but I had to put those six minutes in there because I think that's just insane. And I mean, it takes the average human 24 plus hours for something to pass through our digestive track. So I just think that's crazy that something could come in and out of you in six minutes. Maybe they could win the competitive hot dog eating contest. Yes. Oh my goodness, because

they clear their systems so quickly. So now, obviously, that would freak me out. And, you know, any other normal person. But this biologist, this was not his first rodeo, as you would say, into these weird amphibian functions. In the past, he's studied beetles doing some pretty gnarly things. Now, honestly, I have never really thought that much about the humble beetle before, but after doing research for this fact, the beetle has really gained my respect, and I will tell you why. he studied toads that eat another type of beetle, and that beetle literally forces the to poke them back up, and they come out alive and kicking,

which would also be helpful for a eating competition. And he's also studied a type of beetle called the bombardier beetle, which have evolved chemical defenses against predators that when attacked, these beetles can discharge noxic chemicals at temperatures of approximately 100 degrees Celsius, which is 220. degrees Fahrenheit from the tip of their admins bombing, essentially, their attackers. So he's seen beetles.

I love those fart bombing beetles are some of my favorites. Oh, have you heard of them? I had never. Hence my new love for beetles. I remember when the study about like the speed and heat at which they fart came out. Yeah, I love that. Very much in my, aligned with my interest. It definitely.

It definitely is. So, you know, it's safe to say that he wasn't surprised by these beetles. And he was just like, oh, wow, another crazy beetle doing an obnoxiously absurd thing. But he wanted to figure out some more stuff about it. So first, mainly he wanted to understand how they performed this phenomenal feat. So to figure it out, he first put the beetles, this specific type of beetle in with five different species of frogs. And they all did the same thing. The beetles were swallowed by all the frogs.

and they came out alive. So clearly it's not a just special quirk of the frogs, but it was the beetles themselves. And then after that, he also tested it on not just the specific beetle, but other types of beetles. And all those other beetles did not make it. And this beetle did. So after all these experiments that he did, he found that 90% of that one particular species of beetles, swallowed by all the frog species, made it out alive. And they all made it through within six. hours, which is just very cool. And then beetles of other species did not survive. They came out dead a couple of days later. As is typical for things that are eaten and then pooped, I would say. Yes, that that would be accurate to say, Rachel. So his next question was how this was possible.

And he suspected that it somehow involved the beetle's legs. So to test that, he literally put wax, like wax that you would put on your, like, braces or whatever you need. I don't know, that's the only time ever used wax in my life. So he put wax on the Beatles' legs and then had the frogs swallow them. And after that, they came out three days later or a couple days later, dead. And so that told him that it somehow has the mechanism via them getting out of the digestive system so quickly somehow had to do with how their legs moved. But unfortunately, that's kind of where the story ends because there's no real way to see in real time

how this is happening. But he does in the future want to somehow figure out a way to sort of mimic what's going on in the digestive system to see if you can see what is it about the legs that's allowing them to potentially make these frogs digestive systems kind of churn more quickly or if they're somehow just really fast walkers and they're able to get out. They're just power walking through the frog. Yeah, literally. I think that would be like my tactic if I was stuck in another animal's digestive tract to just be like, okay, I'll just like marathon it out. So yes, this is just like a crazy situation to me.

And it's not only insane, like I was saying, that it's almost like a marathon, especially for these beetles that have like pretty small legs and bodies to travel all of this distance out and come out alive, but also to survive just the insane acidity levels of the frog's digestive systems. I also just to stay on brand found all of these crazy things that humans have. swallowed and it's come out intact. Among the number one things that people swallow are like dentures or tooth caps that. Oh, sure. Yeah. And because these things are so expensive, a lot of dentists have reported that people like bring them into their dental offices and they're like, look, I swallowed this. I cleaned it off with bleach. Please put it back in my mouth because this cost me like $300,

$400. Someone has swallowed a toothbrush. And, and A child has swallowed a SpongeBob SquarePants keychain, and it's come out intact. A piece of a cell phone. What piece of a cell phone? A fidget spinner. Now, that better be a tiny fidget spinner because those things are kind of large. And I believe that's all I wrote down, but I am sure there are a bazillion things that people have swallowed. And I love the digestive system.

and that's it. I'm just trying to imagine how a toothbrush, like a whole toothbrush, could make its way through like the small intestines. Like that's a lot of maneuvering. Yeah, it had to have been like one of those travel toothbrushes or like a mini toothbrush or something. I can't see, you know. Yeah, I'm just thinking of the friend's meme where Ross just goes, pivot, pivot.

The connection between the brain and the gut is truly fascinating. but I love these little Beatles. What a great story. Same. They're just trying to survive, you know, just doing what they can. Yeah. Absolutely. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Hannah, that means it is time for your fact. Okay, amazing. So the journey to me finding, the journey of me finding this fact is kind of long and winding, but there is a payoff and it is good, so bear with me. So like everybody on Twitter, I've been

watching the timeless masterpiece, Avatar the Last Airbender, great show. And in that brilliant show, there's a lot of talk about chakras and energy. So I was really curious about, I don't know, just like where all of this was rooted. And so I started with Wikipedia, and I went down many a rabbit hole. And reading about chakras led me to oras, which led me to the study of metaphysics, which led me to chi. And so chi in traditional Chinese culture is believed to be a universal life force that flows in all beings. and it is also the high-scoring two-letter word and scrabble. So the belief in a universal life force is pretty compelling.

It's a very sci-fi, very Star Wars kind of concept. So I dug into it a little bit more, and I found some more life force theories, which includes Orgon. So Orgonne was quote, unquote, discovered by psychoanalyst Willem Reich in the 1930s. And he claimed that it was an omnipresent force that accumulates in all things, but especially in living beings. So the idea of a cosmic sexual force is pretty strange, and I dug through a bunch of book excerpts and biographies,

and the weirdest part is that this guy's whole life is just really nuts. It's bonkers. So some backstory on Reich. He was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and served in World War I, starting when he was just 17. He met Freud in 1919 and immediately took to Freudian psychoanalysis. So, you know, like Freud, the whole edible complex thing, that's him and Reich was so taken by Freud.

And he was so taken with Freud's ideas about sex that he just completely ran with them. And there's an obsession with sex and relationships throughout this whole guy's career. And in the 1920s, Reich starts writing about orgasic potency, which is basically a term for the ability to have satisfying sex. And Reich believed that you could only achieve orgasic potency once you were free from all neuroses, once you have this clear psyche, then your mind would allow your body to enjoy its libido and all its glory. So basically, you have to be cured of all psychosis in order to have good sex. So Reich moves around Europe throughout the 20s and the 30s, and he never settles anywhere for long.

Local psychiatric societies shun him for promoting things like teenage sex, abortions, and sex education. The fascists thought he was a communist and the communist thought he was immoral. and he develops a bit of an underground cult-like fan base too. So as he moves from city to city, psychoanalysts across Europe and the UK, including Freud, more or less, turn against him. And so, you know, Wright kind of sees himself as an underdog as he's moving from city to city. He's trying to find the place where his ideas will really flourish and thrive. So he moves to Norway, a place that has not yet turned against him. And he starts trying to experimentally prove that living.

libido has electrochemical properties. So he takes this oscillograph, which senses electrical voltages. So he tries to record traces of electricity as his friends and family volunteer to touch and kiss each other. So he's just kind of there watching them like, you know, hold hands and trying to record electrical voltages from their bodies. Wright gets even more into the weeds and Norway starts to get fed up with him. In 1938, more than 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, 65 articles and letters were published in 13 Norwegian newspapers denouncing Reich. Wow. Yeah, yeah.

He was just very, very widely shunned, widely hated across his field in the whole of Europe. So in 1939, humiliated and disgraced, with no place in sight to spread his baseless pseudoscience, where does Wright go? Of course, he goes to America. So he lands in New York. He dodges World War II by a matter of weeks. and he starts teaching and experimenting at the new school. And so this is where he really hunkers down on his Oregon research. He called Orgonne an omnipresent force of life.

He believed it had healing properties and thought it played a role in the weather. So things like droughts were caused by blockages of Oregon in the atmosphere. And then in 1940, Reich started to build insulated Faraday cages, and he called them Orgon accumulators. So normal Faraday cages, they're just boxes or enclosures that are made with materials that conduct electricity. And the idea is that whatever is inside the Faraday cage is kind of shielded from electromagnetic currents. And so these organ accumulators were basically just big vertical boxes, the size of a small closet. And they're made of like plywood and rock wool and sheet iron.

And Reich said that if you sat in one of these accumulators, you could prevent any of your bodily organ from escaping and concentrated inside your body, increasing your health and your sex drive. So, yeah, bold claim. And he really wanted validation from other scientists. After years of being shunned throughout Europe, he wanted someone else to come in and tell him that he was doing a good job with science. So he calls Einstein. The ultimate. The ultimate, yeah. So Reich knew that getting Einstein on board would get him back some form of that public validation that he had lost. And Einstein was initially on board, but when he saw how poorly Reich's experiments were set up, Albert Jump Ship. And then he also asked Reich that his name not be misused for advertising purposes.

He's got to keep his brand image up, you know. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can't really taint that, that reputation. So Reich would get his patients to sit in his organ accumulators naked, and he claimed that by magnifying their body's organ, he could cure things like schizophrenia and cancer and such grandiose expectations. And to be clear, none of this work. ever. Not one time. So Reich told the New School that he had saved countless lives with his secret experiments and the New School had no idea that he was doing all of this and so they fired him, right? I mean, that's the responsible thing to do. And then shortly afterwards, Reich is arrested by the FBI because the FBI was suspecting him of being a Nazi spy or a communist, which

one of those two. One or the other. Just one of the bad things they thought he was. And Reich was, and Reich was super sketchy, but he was neither a communist nor a Nazi. So the FBI admits to their mistake and they release him. And, oh, and by the way, all of this stuff with the FBI and the new school, all of this is happening within two years of Reich moving to the states. Very, very fast, very furious. And in 1942, Reich decides to buy an old farm in Maine to set up a center for the study of Oregon. He refuses to give up. He believes he's onto something. and he calls his estate Organon.

And to this day, it's the home to the Wilhelm Reich Museum, which you can actually visit and kind of see where all of this happened. And then in 1950, Reich established the Organomic Infant Research Center. So Organomic Infant Research Center, the goal being that he thought that if he could prevent organ energy blockages in children before adolescence, he could create a generation of happier, healthier, adults. But this is where things get kind of iffy. And one biographer reported that over the years,

there were multiple accounts of child abuse by the staff. And it's unclear whether Reich was implicated in any of that, but clearly whatever was going on in this building was no good. And so the pseudoscience claims catch up to Reich in 1954. The FDA actually orders an injunction against him on the basis of false medical advertising, and a judge orders Reich to destroy all the accumulators. Not only that, he wants Reich to destroy the instructions to build one, and any books and writings or research on the subject that he's amassed over the years. And so this really, like, takes a toll on Reich, and he kind of, you know, you can see all of this wearing down on him, and he gets a little erratic. He starts believing that the Earth is under attack from UFOs

or energy alphas. He turned one of his accumulators into a, quote, cloud. outabuster that he believed could unblock atmospheric orgone and protect Earth from aliens. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. The story does not end there. In 1956, one of Reich's employees violates the FDA injunction by trying to send part of an accumulator across state lines.

This was actually a sting operation. An FDA undercover agent basically tried to buy an accumulator part and then Reich's employees sent him one. And then Reich is arrested and sent to jail. So Reich is convinced that there is a conspiracy against him. He's had this terrible reputation all across Europe. He's moved from place to place. And as soon as he gets to America, people start persecuting him for his work there too.

So it must be a conspiracy. He tries and fails to make a formal appeal to Jay Edgar Hoover, who was then the head of the FBI. But that failed. And shortly after his imprisonment, Reich was found dead in his prison bed. And he died of heart failure. So, yeah, that was the life of... Wilhelm Reich. But it's interesting that he's pretty unknown because he's actually had a lot of influence on pop culture. For example, Dr. Durand Durand in the famous Jane Fonda movie, Barbarella, he's supposedly based on Reich.

He tries to kill Jane Fonda's character with the excessive machine, like killing her with an orgasm, I think, is what happens. Yeah, that is. Yeah, I would not have made the connection, but. Yeah. So that's. supposedly based on Reich. And Patty Smith Birdland song on her album Horses is based on Reich's life. Kate Bush has a single cloudbusting from 1985 that describes Reich's arrest through the eyes of his son Peter. Jack Kerouac mentions an organ accumulator in On the Road. And J.D. Salinger, apparently, according to his daughter, had and used an organ accumulator. So, yeah, lots of influence across time and culture. Wow.

Who knew that an interest in spiritual energy from Avatar would take me to the Nazi era psychoanalysis of Willem Reich and atmospheric sex energy? But Hannah, what kind of bender are you? That's the important question. Honestly, I don't know. I think I would be an earthbender. I think in my heart of hearts, I really am an earthbender. I think I'm like I want to say I'd be a firebender, but I'm actually a water bender in a very similar way to like, I want to be a slitherin, but I'm really a Ravenclaw.

But they're all great. Wow, that's a bold claim you want to be a slithering. You know, ambition is underrated. I agree. 100%. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? It's a tough call. It is.

It was a week full of weird things, I got to say. I am particularly inspired by the Beatles. You know, I just love the idea of being like, you mess with me, I make you poop. And I walk away all the better for it. The image of a beetle power walking through someone's intestines is great. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now.

And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsai. Dotlis.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bode.

Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes. sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.