The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Organ Meats, Fitness and Sweating, The World's Largest Dog Ban

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from what organs you can and can't eat to the world's largest dog ban. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? Come to our live show in NYC on Sept. 14! https://www.facebook.com/events/205753813627165/ The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Lexi Krupp: www.twitter.com/KruppLexi Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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 a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other 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 Sarah Trowdash. I'm Claire Maldarelli. And I'm Lexi Krupp. Rachel is out this week again. So unfortunately, you are stuck with all of us instead of the lovely Rachel.

So before we get started, I just wanted to remind you that we have a live show coming up on September 14th at 630 p.m. at Caviot in New York City. So if you are in New York City or you'll be visiting New York City or you live within a short drive of New York City or any of the above, buy your tickets. We have links on our Facebook page and on our Twitter, which is we're just underscore thing. It's going to be awesome. There will be games. There will be fun. There will be a lot of weirdos, but you'll be in good company because you are probably. probably also a weirdo. So come join us. We would love to see you. You can see us in person. It'll be

wild. We're that much cooler in person. Yeah, we are. You just, you won't even believe. Like, do you think we're cool now? Yeah, it's going to be great. Here on the weirdest thing, we start with a little tease of what our weird fact is, and then we decide which one we have to hear first, and then everyone spends their little yarns, and then we vote, and then it's all a good time, and you enjoy yourself. I'm going to start. Woo! Okay. Mine is about a group of people who were tasked in the 1940s to figure out how to get housewives to serve more organ meat to their families. Oh my God. Yep.

Claire, you want to go next? Okay. If you are a super fit person, do you sweat more or less than if you are a super unfit person? Oh my God. Spoiler alert. I asked Claire this question. Or I think I said, like, I think this might be true, but I don't know. But you don't know the answer.

I don't know the answer because I was too lazy to look it up and Claire bothered to do the research. Wow. I did a lot. I learned a lot about sweating along the way, I bet. I heart sweat. Wow. Okay. I'm very excited for that.

Lexi. My fact is about the largest area in the world to ban dogs and why the dogs are probably happy about it. That's such a specific category, largest place to ban. dogs. Wow. Oh my goodness. I mean, to be honest, I want to learn about sweat, but I want to learn about organ meat. We're divided. Lexi, you have to vote for one. Okay, there you go. Sweat. Sweat it is. A few weeks ago, Sarah and I were trying to decide if people who are like runners or just do a lot of exercise, really good in the gym at, you know, pumping weights and whatnot, do they, they seem to just like

sweat a ton. So I was like, what factors determine how much sweat you make? Because I am definitely at the elite 1% of sweaters. Some people do sweat more than others, and there's a variety of different reasons for that. And I'm going to list them all for you and tell you cool studies and then answer the question that's burning Sarah and I's brains. I just like, I just need, I want a validating reason that I sweat so much. Like, I'm that person who, when I do push-ups at the end, I have to, like, put down a towel in front of my head because I'm dripping sweat at that point. Like, that's me, and that's embarrassing, and I just want a good reason.

The first thing that I found out was that men actually do sweat more than women. So this is not helping my cause. But there are a bunch of studies done on this, but one of the better ones where they took the same group of men and women at a similar fitness level, and they put them on these stationary bikes, and they had them bike at a similar pace, and they tested two different things. First, they analyzed how many sweat glands they had, and they were able to determine how much sweat was being produced from those sweat glands. How did they do that? Did they have, like, vials collecting their sweat? Right. So they actually, every five minutes, they would collect the amount of

sweat that was on their backs. Like they scraped it. Oh my God. I think of the poor probably grad student who had to do that. And they found that men did sweat more than women, so the vials collected were larger for men. But it wasn't because the women's like sweat glands weren't working or they weren't as activated. Women had just as many sweat glands activated as men.

It's just that men sweat glands were just like profusely. dripping out of them. Do they know why? So that's a huge question in like the sweat research science out there that they really The sweat community. The sweat community that they don't really understand why, but they do think it could be a sort of like a beneficial survival mechanism on both the men's parts and the women's parts for the men.

And I'll get into this a little bit later. For men, in general, the more you sweat, the lower your body temperature so you're able to cool yourself off. So for that, that's a survival mechanism. But then for women, if you sweat less, then you're keeping that water in, so you're not literally dehydrating yourself such that after you do these activities, you don't need to like immediately replenish with water or else die. So both of them are sort of survival mechanisms in themselves, but they don't know why women developed this one versus men developing the other one. Wow. So you and I are just like, we went with the male root, apparently. We did. And there's, and there's,

There's been actually a couple other studies on whether it's like hormone-based. So if like testosterone helps you to sweat more. And one of the studies they did is they gave men actually estrogen and found that they sweat less when they were given estrogen. So maybe estrogen is like that. That's interesting. Okay. So that's, there's one reason.

Okay. And we've got another. That's not about, it's not validating for me yet. So we need to keep going. Okay. Well, this one is probably going to be validating, but I don't think you'll like. It's just simply a genetics thing where some people just have more sweat glands than others. And they did this huge study where they measured the number of sweat glands on various people of

different sizes and whatnot. And they found that some people have as few as two million sweat glands, whereas others have as much as four million. Wow, that's impressive. So it's just completely unfortunate and unfair that some people have more sweat glands in others. Or maybe it's unfair that some people have less sweat glands. That is true. It is a problem if you can't sweat because you can't lower your body temperature.

I mean, that is a huge problem and that's, well, just brings us right to the next one. Wow. What a bit of beautiful narrative sweep. Starting at around age 60, we actually start to sweat less. So as you reach your... So there's some hope from me. But it's also a bad thing, right, because a lot of elderly people are at a bigger risk for heat stroke because they simply can't cool themselves down.

And if you can't be in, like, an air-conditioned environment, you're at a higher risk. And as obviously temperatures continue to rise, and we have these extreme heats like we do now in New York this summer, has just been insane that it's going to be extremely dangerous for elderly people because they just can't cool themselves off to a certain extent. Wow. So that's crazy. And there's all those, like, old athletes who are killing it. but they can't sweat as much.

So maybe they need a lot of, like, I don't know, they need to just, like, run marathons and cooler climates. That's true. Or they need to, like, move to cooler climates and know that, well, their bodies are just not ready for this yet. Or anymore. The next sweat fact of the day is not everyone is a perfect 98.6 degree body temperature. So a fun fact, a few years ago,

former associate editor, Sarah Fecht, and I used to measure our, body temperatures every single day with this new thermometer that you would put on your forehead. And Sarah Effect has a core average body temperature daily of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Wow. Was she always warm? She was always warm. When we first started to do this, she actually thought she was sick and went home early. She was like, I have a fever. And then as it turns out, she just has a fever every single day. But it's just normal for her, so it's not technically a fever. And that all has to do.

like our hypothalamus, which is like our body's internal thermostat and how that works and sort of like genetic based, what your average core body temperature is going to be. So the higher our internal body temperature is, the more we will sweat. So Sarah is just going to sweat more than other people because... Maybe this is a Sarah thing. My core body temperature is actually like a little bit lower. It was like 97 something. So I don't know why I'm sweating.

so much. Wow. But it is true that like, because this is, I've never measured my body temperature every day, but this has always been one of my theories that I just like, I run very warm. Like any, every room I'm ever in, I am too warm and other people are too cold and in our office constantly, Claire, and also often Mary Bath are like, it's really cold in here. And I'm like, no, this is a perfect temperature. My fingernails are turning purple and I can't type.

And Sarah's like, this is ideal environment for me. I am the person, like my AC is set to 65. and I love it. Okay, so this is what I found out as to if people sweat more when they are more fit. And it turns out that they absolutely do. Oh my God. I am so validated. Thank you.

And it has to do with the fact that as someone becomes more fit, his or her body begins to sweat at a lower body temperature such that they are able, they adapt themselves to be able to be able to. to just perform these extreme levels of exercise because their bodies become better at sweating at lower body temperatures. Do we know why? Like, do more sweat glands become active, or is it just a lower activation temperature? It's a lower activation temperature, but it's a huge question and area of research right now as to what the mechanism that does that is and whether we can sort of like hack it to be able to help people who don't sweat as much and are more prone to heat exhaustion or heat stroke than

others. Wow. So it's beneficial because you can exercise without overheating. Right, because say you're a person that just doesn't sweat that much and you go to run a marathon and it's really hot outside, you are going to likely go into heat stroke because sweating cools down and lowers your core body temperature. So if you're not sweating, you're going to increase your core body temperature and then be at risk for heat stroke. I'm so happy that I can now tell this to people. Anyone who questions my sweatiness when it's like 80 degrees out. That's because I'm fit. Yes. I just work out so much that I sweat instantly now. It's because I work out. Yeah. Wow. Do you know how you can stop yourself from sweating? Oh, please do tell Sarah. You can get Botox injections. Oh, I knew that. What? Yeah, because Botox inhibits

your nerve's ability to send signals to that area. And so Botox, like, if you can get Botox, this is a thing that people do. People get Botox injections in their armpits. And you stop sweating from your armpits because, like, you just, you can't send the signals to say, like, hey, start sweating. Oh, do they do that specifically not to sweat anymore? Yeah, because I think there's people who just, like, sweat a ton out of their armpits, like, so much that it becomes, like, really super embarrassing and frustrating.

Yeah. And, like, psychologically frustrating, I think. But my point is that we should embrace it. Like, they're evolutionarily better adapted than us. Because also... They can sew in sponges to their clothing. Because also, I think there's probably a lot of people who are just very concerned that it's embarrassing, like, that other people find it really off-putting,

which, like, is unfortunately probably true because we're not... We're a society that doesn't, like, when people's bodies act like bodies. but that's unfortunate. I feel like we should change the conversation now. It's like it's just going to get hotter out there. Yeah. Embrace the sweat. Embrace the sweat.

I agree. I'm behind this. We are going to take a quick break and leave this room to get some air because I'm already sweating. It's very hot in here. And we will be right back. At Outdoor Life magazine, we've never been easy on the gear we test, which is precisely why you can trust the gear we make. Introducing GuideLife, Performance, Products, and Apparelment,

apparel designed with the editors of outdoor life made for backpackers campers hunters and anyone who enjoys the outdoors and like any great adventure this one starts at base camp the collection includes tents lanterns duffles sleeping bags and pads and more available now on amazon and oelgidlife dot com we are back and we are going to dive into a big old bowl of organ meat so my little story begins in 1941, New York restaurants are serving horse meat in their burgers because there is a national problem, which is that people who are fighting wars, specifically World War II, need to have meat. And so all of the good conveniently shipable meat is going off to Europe. Not all of it, actually, like for the record, rationing in America was much less severe than pretty much anywhere else

of the world. But Americans were real pissed off that they couldn't have their proper burgers and there was a poultry black market, and this is when meatless Mondays became a thing and wheatless Wednesdays. The whole thing was, you know, you were supposed to be patriotic and, like, eat less meat and eat fewer eggs and, like, all these things to help win the war.

And President Hoover said that meats and fats are just as much munitions in this war as are tanks and airplanes. And so the Department of Defense recruited a bunch of sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and they formed the Committee on Food Habits. Margaret Mead was one of the, the principal leaders.

And under her leadership, the committee published, like, more than 200 studies about eating habits and how you get people to change their eating habits. Because I don't know how founded this concern was. I was basically concerned that there was just, like, not enough protein. And Americans were going to suffer. That's probably not true. But especially given, like, that intense exercise was not super widespread. And if it was, it was amongst young men who were fighting a war, not at home.

But they were concerned. And they decided that. The way they were going to solve that was by getting Americans to eat more organ meats because that was the part that nobody wanted. Was organ eating organ meat not popular at all? Like they no one ate it? It was so unpopular that during the Great Depression, butchers gave away liver for free because no one wanted to buy it.

This is, it should be pointed out, like an American thing. It's to some extent also a like Western European thing, but Americans are very screamish generally about organ meat. as evidence by Claire. And also almost everyone else I told about this, too. All right, Sarah. Help me change my ways. All right.

So, wait, okay, we should first wrap up the committee on food habits. Because basically what they found was, like, Americans think that organ meat is weird, and it's unfamiliar, and you don't know how, like, you have a liver. How do you cook a liver? What do you do with it? What do you do with the kidney? How are you supposed to cook a heart?

Is it even good? Nobody knows. So the way that they decided they needed to tackle the problem, was to basically figure out how to make organ meat feel more familiar. And in World War II era, America, the solution was to go to the housewives because the housewives basically made all the decisions about what their families ate. And they gathered groups of housewives together and they tested different ways to convince housewives to serve, you know, kidney.

That's crazy. By the end, there was like only a couple studies. about sort of the popularity of organ meat. I tried to find more statistics, but one study found that organ meat consumption was up 33% during the war, and by 1955 it was up 50%, which is a lot, considering that no one even wanted liver for free in the Great Depression. Oh, wow. Organ meat's actually like very nutritious. I think there's generally an idea that they're not healthy for you. Yeah, I'm super interested in this because I had always thought that like organ meat, it's like it's fatty or it's full of cholesterol and all of those things added up

over time if you're just pounding down the liver every day. So first of all, I mean, they're generally very high in vitamins. I mean, Lexi talked to in a previous episode about how when you have polar bear liver, your skin peels off because you overdose on vitamin A. That's how much isn't a polar bear liver. But all liver is high in vitamin A. Like to the extent that because vitamin A can cause birth defects. So pregnant women are advised not to eat very much liver because if you have too much, like it's a much lower dose that can give birth defects, then we'll give you any problems. Which I thought I'd never heard that. Of all the like pregnant women shouldn't eat this. Yeah. Never heard liver.

Chop liver. Yeah. Doesn't it also have iron too or something? Yeah. I mean a lot of organ meats tend to be like very high in iron, very high in like vitamin D, E, K, A. They are also high in cholesterol. So I look this up because I know obviously there was a huge debate about eggs. Eggs are very high in cholesterol. And so for a long time, the advice was if you were at risk of heart disease, you shouldn't be eating eggs because they're high in cholesterol. But the reality is that most of the research now suggests eating cholesterol does not actually raise your cholesterol by very much at all because taking in a lot of dietary cholesterol just causes your body to make less of it on its own. So not a problem, apparently. I mean,

Yeah, that's super interesting because it was like a debate for a long time. And I think it's cool that we sort of know the mechanism a little bit more now because we were just like, actually eggs are fine, it turns out. Yeah, eggs are great. I have a theory that eggs are the only real superfood because they're hot and just like an enormous number of vitamins. They've got lots of protein. They've got good cholesterol. It's all good.

The thing about organ meats is they do not have the texture of most muscle meat because they're not, well, the heart is muscle, but it's very fibrous, thick muscle. most other organs are not muscle or they're partly muscle. And so they have very different textures, and texture is a huge thing for people. It's why I hate avocados because they have a weird texture to me. So it's hard to get people to get past that. But it's also true that if you don't know how to prepare any of those foods, that you're likely to misprepared them and have them be a terrible texture.

So for a lot of, like, organ meat first timers like myself, and I'm sure a lot of listeners here, don't regularly eat organ meat as part of their, like, you know, eating diet cycle. What would you recommend on how to, like, kickstart an organ-meeting diet? An organ-eating. An organ-eating. An organ-eating diet. I would go pat-et, although there are moral objections to pat-A that are perfectly valid,

and I am amenable, too, and just a callous, cold-hearted human being. Paté, foie, foie, those are organ meats. that have fancy names, and so you don't say liver when you order it, and so it feels better to not say it. It's like, you know. Is the texture, it's like very pre and cheesy? Yes, it's very, like, dense, so you can't, you cannot eat a lot of it. Okay. I love liver, and I cannot eat a lot of it, because it is very rich, and they do because it

tends to be high in iron. It does tend to have kind of an intense flavor. It's like pigeon is very high in iron, like the muscle meat is high in iron, and a lot of, lot of people don't like how pigeon tastes squab. You see it as squab on a menu. Interesting. Maybe not you. People eat pigeons? Lexi is looking at me. Yeah, Eleanor, our lovely editorial assistant, wrote a great article about people eating pigeon and how that's making a comeback. Pigeon used to be very popular. Great. She hated it. She tried it. And she thought it was awful. I like it. I've yet to

meet a meat that I didn't like. There are like a couple of health risks. Can you tell everyone what the name of the article that you're? The name of this article, it's on Eater. The Awful Eaters Handbook, Awful O-F-F-A-L, just for the record, awful is like organ meats. The Awful Eaters Handbook, Untangling the Myths of Organ Meets. It goes through all the organs. There are a lot of organs. I didn't think people ate.

It's good. Lungs. You cannot eat lungs in the U.S. apparently. The USDA outlawed them because there's like a very slight chance that if the end. animal has like tuberculosis or some other kind of pulmonary disease that you could get that disease from eating it because tuberculosis sort of sits in the phlegm for a long time it can like remain dormant and then come back yeah um so you can't eat lung but as far as i can tell you can eat almost all of the other parts um brain is the one that people get freaked out by because of prion

diseases um it's like if you don't know prions are just misfolded versions of your normal brain proteins. Mad cow disease is a priont disease and they are truly terrifying because there is no cure and we don't really understand how they work yet. No, I wouldn't eat animal brains personally. There's prion diseases in like goats and sheep and cats and all these other kinds of things. Okay, so brains out. Yeah, but people do eat them in scrambled eggs, which is an upsetting texture to imagine because the brain is the fattiest organ. So it's very gooey and gelatinous. Ugh, goodness. It's mixed in with the only superfood. Yeah. Thank you for validating that. I mean, the most common ones are like so blood,

like blood sausage or block pudding. Okay, I've had black pudding. Did you like it? Absolutely not. I thought the texture was just bizarre. And then to be 100% honest, I didn't really know what it was. I've had blood sausage. I bought it from I'm a Spanish import star in New York. It was, I liked it, but it was definitely a flavor. Yeah. It was a very particular flavor that I have never tasted anywhere else before. You definitely need to get used to it.

Wait, is it like sausage filled with blood? It is blood. It is coagulated blood. That's it. That is all. In a casing. If you're, like, low in iron, it's really good for you. Yeah. I could probably use some.

Right. Yeah. You definitely can't eat a lot of it. You know, blood might be a little intense for you. Don't go with that for your first organ meat. I would go bone marrow. Oh, is that considered organ meat? Because I've had bone marrow.

I had bone marrow. Oh, my God. We are all organ meat eaters. Yeah, bone marrow is delicious. Why have you had bone marrow? Well, when I was like 10, I was at Jamaica, you know, restaurant and there was bone marrow. Yeah. I'm a big fan of Asabuco.

Asabuco is really good, and that is bone marrow. I also found out that you can eat the face of animals, which is called, which is what head cheese is. Head cheese. It's not such a bad name. You like boil the head for a long time and all the connective tissue just like becomes gelatinous. I'm dying. I'm so sorry. Why cheese?

Like cheese is such a good product. And head cheese. The fact that they called it that. Why call it that? Yeah. People like eyes. Oh, I knew that. which is, it seems like an unpleasant texture to me, but lots of people eat them.

Okay, so could you theoretically eat an entire animal? I think you could eat pretty much the thing. And this is, like a mammal. Yeah, I think you could come very, very close. Like, there's even a listing for tendon in this article. I didn't know that you could eat tendons. But you should steer clear of the brain, basically. That's it.

Yeah, I mean, realistically, the risk is very small. And the lungs, yeah. But pretty much the rest of the animal, which is, like, honestly, maybe the best argument for eating more organ meats is that, like, we have a lot of animal product waste. And right now a lot of it goes into like dog food. I'm not a vegetarian, but I probably should be. If we're killing animals, we may as well be eating the whole animal and putting it to good use as opposed to throwing most of it away. So maybe we need a resurgence. Like we need another group like they did during World War

2 to like bring it back or to like get better facts about it so that people like me aren't like, oh my God, organ meat. I mean, organ meat does sound unappetizing. It is who kind of making a comeback in like high-end restaurants because you know people like chefs who you know went to train in italy like the you know traditional cooking involved much more of the animal because you didn't have that many animals it wasn't easy to come by um so i mean if you live near like a butcher and you are a person who eats animals um like ask your butcher what bits of the animal they can what kind of animals left i mean like butchers know like they're very they're intimately familiar with it often Butchers, like, get, I think, get to take home bits of the animal that, like, don't sell because people don't want to eat them.

And it's cheap. Very cheap form of meat because other people don't want them. Take advantage now before we bring back organ meats. Before Sarah Chodach single-handedly brings back organ meats. Yeah, I'm going to be the new committee on food habits. So now that I've grossed everyone out, I think we'll take a break and then don't worry, you can come back to some cute dogs. I'm so sorry if I've grossed you out. If you're a vegetarian, I applaud your choices.

I wish I could be as strong. All right, we'll be right back. It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet. On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories affect your daily life. New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then.

All right, we are back for the dogs. We're only here for the dogs. Tell us about the dogs, Lexi. We need some cuteness. This is the lack of dogs. This is dog-free land. This area larger than the United States because it's a whole continent, the continent of Antarctica. Wow.

Yeah. I'm giving you a disclaimer in advance that this is a sad journey, but it has a happy ending. So back in the 1980s, the environmental protocol, which is this big treaty, international treaty for protecting Antarctica, so that they were going to kick out all non-native species. But not humans. But not humans. We're the worst ones, but okay.

Yes, yes. And so even before we go into the dog thing, I was like, how do you make laws in Antarctica, which is like a lawless land? Well, that's a good question. It's a lawless land. Yeah, yeah, and so this treaty is really sweet. They said Antarctica has been designated as a natural reserve devoted to peace and science. Oh, that's lovely.

Wow. I know. So in the name of peace and science. They banned the dogs. They banned the dogs. Actually, for a pretty good reason, because they are afraid that dogs might transmit diseases like canine distemper to local seals. Oh. And that's pretty valid concern because distemper is a virus that spreads through sneezing or coughing.

Animals get really sick. In wild animals, it often looks like rabies. So, yeah, I wouldn't want, you know, the Antarctic Seals to have canine distemper. Me neither. Originally, so I said the dogs are probably happy about being banned from Antarctica because I was looking into the history of dogs there, and they had a pretty, pretty unhappy time, I would say. I mean, yeah, they're definitely not designed to be in Antarctica.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so a lot of people brought them down there as sled dogs. So were they all like husky type dogs, or were they? So at first, like in the first account I could find of dogs in Antarctica is in 1898. And they were sled dogs. But sled dogs, like, that's not referring to one breed. there's a whole bunch of different breeds that are considered sled dogs. And people didn't really know what breed was best.

So that first time they brought down the wrong breed. These dogs were used to working in a snow, not the ice. So a few dogs froze to death and died. Yeah, I know, I know. And then a few years later, a German explorer brought the right kind of dogs. But they had so many dogs that they couldn't bring them all back on their boat so they had to shoot them. Wait, what?

How did they get there if they couldn't come on on the boat? Oh, oh, they had to, so they brought a bunch of dogs down there and then they bred. They had a bunch of puppies, and they couldn't fit them all, which is, like, how small of a boat are you bringing that you can't fit in your dogs on there? Yeah, a couple more dogs? Yeah, but they had to shoot the dogs. That's really sad. So that was sad.

And then the real, like, big moment in, in dog history in Antarctica's in 19. 11 when this dude named Rolald Amundsen set out to reach the South Pole. And he originally started with 98 dogs, much of which he picked up from Greenland. And on his first... That seems like the wrong end of the world, but okay. The Greenland dogs are really hardy, and he's like, I need some hardy dogs down there. All right, that's fair. And the Greenland goes...

Going to Greenland. Yeah. Just on the way. Picking up my dogs. Detour. Yeah. 98 dogs may seem like a lot to you and it was. It should have been 101.

I mean, has he seen a hundred and eight? Probably not, I think he had. Definitely not. Also, I don't know that Dalmatians would do so well down there. No. But he wanted to bring so many dogs because he was planning on eating them on the way. Oh, goodness. I know, I know this.

Goodness. I promise there will be like a happy ending. Yeah, but it takes a while to get there. So anyway, he started, so he had like, expedition failed. He had to turn back. So then the second time he went out, he took 52 dogs with him. And only

16 made it down to the South Pole because they were eaten along the way. Like he ate them? Yes. That's a lot of dogs to eat. What? It wasn't just him. Did he feed the dogs to the other dogs? He better have eaten the organ meat and like had those the least amount as possible.

Yeah. So he had 15 other men with him and then he was feeding the dogs to the dogs. Why do you need 15 other people? I'm sorry. I don't know. I don't know. This is so wasteful. Those poor dogs.

I know. I know. All they did was love their people. Exactly. Oh, my God. I know. More bad. Okay, we have to keep going.

We have to press through. We got to get to the happiness. So then he, 16 dogs at the South Pole, they come back. There's only 11 dogs when they make it back to the shoreline. And then I think the rest of those dogs like die on the way home. So only one dog makes it back to Norway. way. And I have a photo of this dog stuffed right here. He's really cute. He looks like, oh, what a champion. Look at him. He's like a big bear. Yeah, he does look like a teddy bear.

And he really lived like a king. His name was Oberstyn. And he had a litter of puppies with his girlfriend, Lucy. And the local butcher would give him big slabs of meat whenever he walked by. Because he's a good boy. And he lived until he was 13. Oh, that's a ripe old age. Yeah, so one dog out of 98. Wow. Does he have any, like, statues?

You know, like, there's that stuff. Well, there's this stuffed. I don't know if there's a statue. He's in a museum. Wow. Stuffed. Yeah, he's stuffed. Is that in Norway?

I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. So they, I mean, he's like, I think a well-known dog there. Now they're banned completely from Antarctica. Yeah. So this was in 1911. They were banned in 1990.

So they were still like a pretty long history. So it wasn't because of the dogs. It was the concern of the environment. It wasn't because of these dogs. No, no, no, no. I just wanted to know about the history of dogs. The history of dogs, yeah, before they were kicked out. Yeah.

And the craziest dog story I found was from 1957. And this was the first Japanese expedition to overwinter in Antarctica. So they brought 15 dogs with them, Sack Hall and Huskies. And I have a picture of those two. And they're also really cute. Look at them. Oh my goodness. They're so cute.

They're these big sort of dark fluffy dogs. And yeah, they have a lot of fur. They're very sweet. So this group of people were planning on staying in Antarctica for a year. And when they were leaving, the second group coming in, hit a big storm, so they couldn't get there. The second group couldn't get there. And the scientists who were in Antarctica got evacuated by helicopter. And they thought that another group was going to come in a few days later after the storm passed. So they left the dogs. They had 15 dogs

with them chained up outside with a couple days' worth of food. Outside? Yeah. They couldn't bring them in the building? I don't know. I don't know. It actually turned out to be a really good thing that they left them outside. Interesting. You will see. Yeah. So there was this big storm, and the second group was never able to make it, and the window to get into Antarctica is really small.

So they were doing this in February. So then the next group couldn't come, so they had to wait a whole year in order to come back. And so they were expecting to find 15 dead dogs when they came back. But instead, eight of the dogs had escaped their chains, and so six of them totally disappeared. They couldn't find them, and they think that they formed like a dog pack and ate penguins and seals and fish stuck in the ice.

Oh, wow. But two of the dogs were there alive when they arrived. And they greeted them, and they were so happy to see them because dogs are the best and so loyal and unconditional in their love. How did they survive? Because they're amazing dogs. But they weren't part of the pack. They don't think.

So they probably were. They probably were. And then the other dogs were just doing something else. They're not there at the time. Or it died. Yeah. Or like wandered off somewhere. But these two dogs survived and made it the whole year.

In Antarctica by themselves. Yeah. I have a description of the dogs. Their names were Taro and Jiro. and Taro was three years old and he had a black coat and Jiro was his brother and had a dark brown coat with a ripple of white on his chest, white and white socks. The brother survived.

Yeah, so Taro and Jiro stayed in Antarctica to pull sleds for the new expedition. And in 1960, Jiro died of disease of natural cause in Antarctica and Taro the next year returned his hometown of Sapporo where he lived for another 10 years. Wow. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so he, like, lived out his life,

and he was totally a national hero. So there's a big statue in Japan of both those dogs, Taranjuro, and he's in a museum, there's a bunch of movies made about him. I think it's a fairly well-known story within Japan, but I had never heard it before. Yeah. Yeah, my friend Charlie told me about it,

and I was like, what? That's the best dog story ever. That's so crazy. Yeah, dogs are such, like, hearty, hearty stock. It's amazing that they are, too, like, given how much we've bred them just, like, for, I mean, I admittedly there's sort of categories, like, you know, dogs who wear bread to be working dogs or, like, you know, bred to be out in mountains, are going to be much hardier than, like, little tiny dogs that we've just bred for aesthetics.

Yeah. This is Giro. Oh, wow. We should all look this up because these are the cutest dogs. This breed is actually pretty endangered, I guess, of dying out because there aren't that many of these types of huskies around anymore. Yeah. Is that just because there's no demand for the... Because Antarctica banned dogs.

I don't know if that's the reason. Damn in Antarctica. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So, but I think on the whole, it's probably good because dogs, they had a really rough go there. Yeah, we probably should stop. I think it was good that we stopped bringing them.

Yeah. Wow, well, at least that had a happy ending. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just rough getting there. Yeah, really? All right, so now we have to vote on the weirdest fact. Okay, this is a real hard one for me, because I love dogs and I thought that was such a great story. It's like, I think I might go with that one, but then organ meets.

I think definitely organ meets. I learned so much about organs. About organs. Same. And I feel like it's really kind of changed my. my mind, like maybe a tiny bit, such that, like, maybe, Sarah, if we were to, like, make some type of liver thing, I would try a bite. Wow. I'm, you don't know how happy that makes me. Wow. Thank you so much. This is an honor. Yeah. I'm so happy to share my love of

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