The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Serial Poopers, Elephants on LSD, Whiskey Business

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from an elephant on an acid trip to people who urgently need to poop upon entering bookstores. 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 Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/corinneiozo Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- 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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That's code Weirdest for 20% off. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice. work. Now, Hank says, on line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets.

Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. 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 sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Corinne Iosio and I'm Sarah Chodosh. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, putting together a print magazine because we still do that in the Year of Our Lord 2020.

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. Corinne, it's been a while. Welcome to the show. Hello. Would you like to start with your tease? Sure. I am going to talk about a very strange intestinal reaction that some people have in bookstores.

This feels really right up my alley. Chi-I problems and books. I would like to talk about the elephant in the room and specifically how that elephant is on a lot of acid. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. Sarah, your tease, please?

My fact is about what William Howard Taft, President, Supreme Court Chief Justice, and man famous for getting stuck in a bathtub, has to do with... After my own heart. Has to do with rapid-aged whiskey. Wow. Fascinating. We've got three confusing facts. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. Where to begin?

I need to know about the GI reactions. Okay. Great. All right. So the first thing I want to do is give credit to my friend Gabe, who, several months ago brought this fact to my attention. Gabe is a book editor. He has his own imprint. And as such, he spends a lot of time browsing bookstores. And we're just hanging out one day, having a couple beers. And he casually mentions to me that his brother flat out refuses to go

into bookstores with him. Because every time he goes in, very quickly upon entry, he is overcome by the urge to poop. Wow. And weird. Yeah. And I completely did not believe this. I'm like, okay, I wouldn't really want to go into the vortex of walking into a bookstore with a book editor either. It sounds like a really great excuse. I got a poop. Sorry. Sorry, I got to go. I'll be outside. So naturally, I decided to talk to the internet about it. And at least as far as the internet is concerned, this actually is a thing.

There's countless Twitter posts, Reddit threads, just way more information about people's shopping bathroom habits. than you ever wanted to know except that if this has happened to you, you were very much not alone. It has a name. It is called the Mariko Ayoki phenomenon. It is so named after the first person that we know of to document it, the Japanese woman who wrote a letter to a magazine in 1985. She wrote, I'm not sure why, but about two or three years ago, whenever I go into a bookstore, I get struck by an urge to move my bowels. And this was just a letter to the editor. They probably published it, because they, They thought it was, you know, weird and quirky and entertaining. And then they got so much mail. I thought I was the only one.

All the bookstore poopers come out of the woodwork. No, letters to the editor are the Reddit of 1985. Yeah, very true. And so they commissioned for their next issue a 14-page investigation to try to understand what in the actual hell was going on. I wish we got these kinds of letters to the editor. Right? It's amazing. Inconclusive.

Just so we're all right. 14 pages of inconclusive reporting. That's a lot of pages devoted to nothing. You couldn't cut that down. Seriously. And now, yeah. And here we are 35 years later, still not quite sure exactly what's going on. Wow.

So it's a phenomenon. It's just like it happens. Some people say, yes. But of course, that doesn't mean that there's a shortage of explanations. Offerings. Hypotheses, if you will. Naturally, some people say it's an urban myth. like a group think thing where it's just sort of people talking themselves into stuff.

But there's also a whole bunch of physiological and psychological hypotheses about what's actually going on. So before we dive into all of the things we don't know, we're just going to take a quick second to talk about what we actually do. Now, we all are familiar with the concept of like you haven't dropped a deuce when you were away from your home. You're on vacation. You come home and you're immediately overcome with the urge to. urge, so to speak, and we know that familiar places can trigger this. And, you know, perhaps for some people, bookstores are familiar. There's also reports of people having to go to the bathroom in CVS and Target and video game

stores and grocery stores. A lot of those places will not have a bathroom for you. I was just going to say, I've never been to a CVS where you can go to the bathroom. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a story about this. Oh, boy. Wow. Talk to us.

I was on a road trip and I really had to use the restroom. And so I walked into the Walgreens and I was like, please, please can I use your restroom? And they were like, yeah, I guess so. And so this woman walked or she was like, go to the back of the store. And then she got on the radio and she said, code B. You're a code B. Yeah. So then they sent somebody to unlock the bathroom for me.

That was code B. So that's my story. They apparently have secret bathrooms if you ask them really nicely and desperately. I always wondered about that. Like if you walk in and we're like, I am about to poop my pants. You must let me in here. I must. I think most people would out of the kindness of their heart be like, yeah, it's okay.

Semi-related. There are people called serial poopers who go into stores and then like poop among the racks. And nobody's quite sure why. Intentionally? Yeah. One time I spent one semester at Boston University. This is not a story of me pooping in a store. Rachel is the cereal pooper.

Quick, just cut Rachel's microphone. Yeah, I was at Boston University for one semester before I transferred. back to Simon's Rock, go llamas. And right after I had decided that I wanted to go back to Simon's Rock, I walked into the like group bathroom, standard dorm building stuff. And I opened the bathroom stall. And there was just a poop in the middle of it. Like on the floor?

Like on the floor? Just giant. It was very deliberate. And you know what? It made me feel really good about my decision to leave. That's just so mean. Because like think of the person who has to click. up your poop later. I know. Well, it wasn't me. I can tell you that. Rachel,

I backed away. Anyway, cereal pooping aside. Let's talk about us feeling the need to poop when we return to familiar places. Now, in 2017, the Atlantic dug into what they call, and this is their term, and I quite love it, returners release. And specifically into what's basically like the call and response that your body has with familiar environments. There's all kinds of notions that, you know, our microbiomes and our homes, microbiomes talk to each other. There's all, there's relationships between your blood glucose and things like that and you being home. So like naturally, okay, cool, it makes perfect sense that, you know, you're in your safe place now. It's time. You may release your bowels. Yes. It's such a calming voice. I wish I heard that in my head every time I needed to

feel like every time you just were having like a little bit of anxiety. It's not exactly like the guy from Headspace. I love Headspace. Oh, my God. I had no idea. I had this talent. But that doesn't necessarily apply to all of the people who are experiencing the Mariko Aoki phenomenon, right? Because, like, a bookstore isn't necessarily a super familiar place for everyone.

But it does affect a lot of people. An extremely scientific BuzzFeed poll says that 61% of respondents have had this moment in a bookstore specifically. That's 100% of Biosavastor payment, though. 60% of humans don't have to poop when they go to a bookstore, right? Just 60% of humans who GoogleDor clicked on an article. Yeah, who went to that BuzzFeed article. Who just needed to be like, me too! But anyway, that doesn't stop us from wanting to really understand why. So I'm just going to tick through a couple of the thoughts about what exactly is going on here. One of the most widely reported is that it has something to do with the chemical smells of the inks and the glues and the paper.

That would make sense. You know, there's precedent for different smells and tastes triggering extreme sudden digestive response. Is it because people read on the toilet and then the smell of a book? Oh, that's interesting. See, Rachel's like, Rachel's as smart as these scientists because they've also tried to figure that out. But on the smell thing, one Japanese researcher got a bunch of old books and newspapers and buried his face in them for 10 minutes. The poop status on that was negative. So yes, there's another notion of like we associate reading with toilets.

And so it's sort of a Pavlovian response. And for some people, this goes all the way back to when they were potty training because a lot of potty training involves books and books, you know, like everybody poops. Yeah. So there's potentially a really strong association there. Again, nobody's done any study to really prove it. So, you know, we're there. We're relaxed. Some people find reading soothing.

Reading soothes people to sleep. Why wouldn't it possibly soothe them to poop? I wonder, is there like, has anyone investigated whether there's a correlation between people who like enjoy reading or like people who read on the pooper and pooping when in bookstores? So, shockingly, I found no studies or data even like trying to find. The simplest study to do. But then, so like relaxation rights, some other people think that the opposite is true. that people have stressful associations with books. They're overwhelmed by all of this information.

And oh, my God, I have to make a decision. I have to pick a book out of all these books. My tiny lady brain is overcome and I just must poop. Oh, wo is me. So many words, so much knowledge I will never possess. Or that, like, it's triggering stressful memories from when we were in college, like cramming at a library. Yeah, this is what I thought it was going to be, that people are stressed out by bookstores.

And it's like a fighter flight. And your body's like, get rid of the poop. No. Well, because we know that like a sudden light the load. Yeah. Because we do know. Yeah. It's like sudden stress makes us kind of, makes a shit in our pants.

When I was on the swim team and I would like have to go up and get ready and like stand behind the block, inevitably all I got up there and was like, oh no, I had to go to the bathroom. I think it's often because the blood is being diverted away from digestion. It's why you vomit too. Yeah. Well, some people vomit. It's also why you get diarrhea when you run. Yeah.

Or don't. I mean, I don't want to suggest that everyone who runs gets the runs. But it does happen. Many. Just enough for it to be a thing. So that's just the psychological stuff. There are also some pretty dubious physiological explanations having to do with our posture when we crouch down or bend at the waist to look at the shelves. We're like straightening out our poopers.

It's like being on a squatty potty when we get down to the lower shelf. Those are so good. They're so comfy, although crossing your legs kind of does the same thing. Interesting. Interesting. It's true that I probably crouch in that position in a bookstore more than, like, anywhere else. But I don't know. I do it in the grocery store.

Yeah, that's true, too. How many people are crouching down to look in books? I'm not buying it. Especially if it's like as you walk it. Yeah, I just feel like everyone, you start browsing. Like, you have to be really into it to be catching down to look at the books. Yeah. Yeah, but if you think that that is ridiculous, there are other ones that say something about tilting your head to the side and your gaze as you like glance over the spines of the books has some sort of digestive trigger beyond.

Just so beyond anything. Wow. Yeah. So that is probably the most whacked out of the theories and that is where the theories end. I like the association of like books. I don't read books on the toilet. So I didn't think about that. But it's weird, though, because I was so curious about this because it flies so contrary to this notion that a lot of people just don't like pooping in public.

It's a pretty common thing. But like if you get so stressed out and you have this, it's actually, it's not like an actual condition that's in the DSM, but there is a condition in the DSM about fear of urinating in public when other people might hear. But there's a complementary condition that we don't really have data about for not wanting to. poop when other people might hear you or might likely be around. But holding it in can be like real bad. Yeah. Yeah. It's not good. You get constipated. Well, yeah. And then in the long run, if you put enough stress and strain on those muscles and nerves, opposite problem. Yeah. Oh, I thought you were going to say like hemorrhoids. No, no. You'll make yourself like sustained, repeated constipation can actually then make you not constipated. That's unfortunate. Yeah. So I don't know.

I guess the upshot here is like nobody seems to really know why this happens to people in bookstores. But if you got a poop, you should, you know, find a bathroom. Please don't be a cereal poop. Don't be a serial pooper. But just do it and read the books. We like books. Yeah. Though probably not in the bookstore.

No. Don't bring those into the toilet with you. Did anybody else see that episode of Seinfeld? George took a book into the bathroom with him, you know, whatever their equivalent in Barnes & Noble was. And then they forced him to buy it because it had been flagged. And then you tried to return it at other bookstores and they looked at it and they spied some unknown market. And it was like, I'm sorry, sir, this book has been flagged. Flagged by poop.

Yep. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about an elephant on an acid trip. It's a sad trip. Oh, no. A bad trip. A bad trip, a sad trip.

It's kind of like Dumbo, Jess. Aw. So that movie is kind of an acid trip. I'll just say that. It's a really disturbing story. I don't want to talk about it. This is also kind of a disturbing story, but it has a slightly more uplifting ending. So it's 1962, and this elephant named Tusco is the prize of Oklahoma City Zoo.

He's 14. He's in his prime. He's a robust specimen weighing more than three tons. And scientists at the University of Oklahoma decide to shoot him up with acid, meaning LSD. How much acid do you have to give an elephant? Oh, we're going to talk about that. They made the wrong choice.

So, ostensibly, they were doing this to try to incite something called must. It's spelled M-U-S-T-H. It's an Urdu word from the Persian for drunk. And it's this period that male elephants go through of like really intense aggression and their testosterone spikes. It's like an average of 60 times higher than normal, but can be up to, I think, 140 times higher. So it's a process we don't really understand even now, but it's likely linked somehow to like some sort of rut or the pheromones involved in territorial meeting practices and just like arousal in general. It probably has something to do with mating.

But yeah, it causes problems when elephants are in captivity, even elephants that are known to play. play really well with humans and act fine and not try to kill people can get really, really violent without much warning. So if you're going to keep elephants in zoos, which is, you know, it may be a subject for debate. Understanding must is something that researchers have been hoping to do for a while. And the thing is, it's hard to study something that we don't really understand when it's like a random biological process that you don't know how to trigger or control. So they were trying to come up with like an analogy for it, you know, some kind of controllable experimental protocol they could put in place that's like we do this and it triggers this behavior

that is almost identical to must. And so we can study that and study how to stop that. And for some reason, they decided that LSD could be a way to do this. It is unclear why and frankly suspicious that they chose LSD, which will get into more in a minute. But instead of inducing rage or violence, the drugs led Tusco to collapse and start seizing. Oh, my God. Yeah, after just five minutes. And then about 20 minutes later, they gave him a really potent antipsychotic, which did nothing to help.

And then they ended up tranquilizing him because he was seizing and clearly in a lot of distress. And he died shortly thereafter. Oh, Jesus. But it doesn't take too much scrutiny to see a ton of flaws in the experiment, even ignoring the whole issue of them not having any indication that LSD would even. induce the behavioral situation they were trying to study. The researchers involved didn't really note their reasoning or dosing on the drugs they were using to intervene.

So now researchers say it's impossible to actually tell what killed Tusco. And in fact, most think it was probably the antipsychotic and or the barbiturate that was given to him to calm him down, not the LSD. Like they stopped his heart? Yeah, exactly. And then there's the LSD itself. So the scientists injected Tusco with 297 milligrams of LSD, which might not sound like that much because it's about 100 milligrams later than the optimal dose of ibuprofen for an adult human. Don't you take like micrograms though?

Exactly. Right. But yeah, LSD is really strong. Doses are counted in micrograms and that's one-tenth the mass of a grain of sand. So we know that LSD targets have few receptors in the brain, but the key one is the serotonin receptor. and the LSD molecule catches onto it in such a way as to make the receptor close up around it. So it just stays in there making the receptor fire repeatedly, which is what causes hallucinations. And until your brain cells can absorb the receptor and break down the molecule, which takes several hours, you'll keep feeling the effects.

So, yeah, it does not take a lot of LSD to take it to some crazy places. In humans, and some of this information is from the Illinois Science Council. They have a blog about Tesco. So in humans, just 20 to 30 micrograms of LSD is enough to induce hallucinations, which is about 0.02 milligrams or 0.004 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. And around 100 to 200 micrograms, which is still just 0.1 to 0.2 milligrams, is enough to produce major mental disturbances in people like psychosis and delirium. Tusco's dose was equivalent to 0.1 milligrams per kilogram or about 25 times what would induce psychosis in a three-ton human body. Oh, my God. So when did we figure out this math?

Did they just not understand numbers? So they understood. I will get into the researchers who were doing this experiment in a second. But it seems like that they were convinced based on what studies there were of animals and LS. that it would take more, not just per kilogram, but just more in general. Because their circulatory systems are fundamentally different or something. Yeah. And it's just, it's really a fundamentally flawed way for them to go about it. Usually when you're giving any kind of creature, whether they're human or a non-human animal,

some kind of substance for the first time on the record, or even when they're just not a huge body of evidence about how much is right to give them, you start with what you're almost certain is way to say. small and then you move up. You know, it's pretty straightforward. Not hard to understand the logic there. And instead, it seems like they just were like, well, better make sure we get a big enough dose. So, God. Almost 300 milligrams it is. So why did this happen? You might ask, rightfully. We've asked so many times on this show. Yes. Yeah. And I think that we're all just so stunned that the words aren't coming. But yes, that. So one suspicious player in the affair is that the late doctor. Louis Jolian Jolly West. He was known as Jolly. Did he study elephants? No. But he did help the government

study LSD as a possible tool for mind control. Wow. Wow. Great. Yeah. A little aside about what LSD is. Lestrgic acid diethylmide, the LSD acronym actually comes from the German name, fun fact, was derived in 1938 by Albert Hoffman. He made it from a chemical produced by Urget, the hallucinogenic fungus. that grows on rye. And apparently he actually accidentally ate some around five years after synthesizing it and realized its psychedelic properties. And then he decided he would start experimenting with dosage. And it was actually marketed in Europe as a psychiatric wonder drug. Then the CIA had to step in and literally buy the world's supply of it for $240,000 so they could try to use it for mind control during the Cold War. The CIA has truly done some unbelievable things.

Yes. Yeah. It's like the Manchurian candidate. More true than you would like to believe. Exactly. So yeah, this infamous suite of projects was called MK Ultra. And people talk about it a lot. But I wanted to bring it up in relation to the Tusco story.

Because I think at least for me, I always kind of assumed that the wildest stories were ones that we like didn't have confirmation of. Like I knew that MK Ultra was real. I knew that the government had been like, can we control mines maybe with drugs? But so here's just one example to make it clear how absolutely crazy this shit was. In Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA turns some of their San Francisco safehouses into brothels and drugged customers. The logic being that they would be too ashamed of where the incident had occurred to ever tell anyone. And then they watched them through a two-way mirror to see how the LSD affected them. Midnight Climax.

Yes. Operation Midnight Climax. What a name. And I had that you were stuck there too. I had heard this before, but I had heard this before, but I thought it was something that, like, people thought might have happened. But no, this is, like, a declassified 100% true thing. Do you just feel like maybe the CIA for a while was, like, a bunch of college bros grown up who were like, what if we give a bunch of people some acid? They're just trolling everyone just a little bit.

Like, how old do you think we could keep this going? Yeah. Yeah. And acid wasn't even illegal in the U.S. until 1968, and they did that because hippies were having too much fun with it. So they needed to shut that down. Trying to learn more about themselves and have a good time instead of mind-controlling people with them. So our parents ruined everything. And at least, according to the CIA, it was never really worked out as a mind-control drug.

So there is evidence that it does make you more susceptible to the power of suggestion, which is, you know, I would say most drugs. particularly hallucinogenetics. Yeah. So there's a lot of actually really fascinating research on LSD starting to come out of the wordwork now. You know, for a while it was not really something you could get funding for because of how it was illegal. Thanks, government. But it's considered one of the safer drugs. You can definitely have a bad trip, but it's not considered addictive.

There have been deaths on LSD, but it's not something you can strictly speaking OD on. and it has some really positive effects when taken in the right settings. There's a lot of research now on people overcoming depression, anxiety, PTSD, by having guided counseling sessions while being on LSD or psilocybin, which are magic mushrooms, which are a very similar hallucinogenic compound. And a lot of it people think may come down to interesting connections that seem to happen in the brain when you're on LSDYSYN, LSD, just parts of the brain talking to each other in a different way than usual. And also something

called the default mode network, which is basically the functional connections in your brain that are kind of running in the background and are actually more active when you're not focused. It's like the brain system that makes up your stream of consciousness physically has like less going on when you're on LSD. And they think that's what leads to this kind of ego disillusion where you are like feeling more connected to the world. And like it's really hard to describe because it's like literally just like you, the sense that you are an individual separate from other people and the world and things around you. Just kind of goes away, apparently, or can.

They just want to love, man. So with the right kind of talk therapy, this kind of dissolution of the ego seems to help people overcome various, traumas or anxiety about death. It's been especially promising for patients of terminal illness and in kind of helping people break free from those kinds of fears. So yeah, there's now starting to be really cool research on it. No thanks to the CIA and M.K. Ultra. And to briefly bring it back to poor Tusco, in 1984, a scientist named Ronald Siegel, who was best known for his argument that humans and other animals are hardwired to seek out mind-altering experiences. in the form of like alcohol stimulants and psychoactive compounds.

Like he thought we were just inherently driven to try to like get turn. In scientific parlance. I think, I just wish that everybody could see the hand gesture. And so he decided to repeat the Tesco experiment with much more rigor, which is to say any rigger at all. So he used two elephants and he gradually figured out the dose by starting small and working up. And his team wound up with 0.003 milligrams per kilogram low end dose and a 0.1 milligram per kilogram dose for the high end, which is the same that Tuska received. But instead of injecting it into their muscles, they administered it in water the same way humans take LSD. You know, generally it would be like dissolved into your mouth. And so they just like didn't give elephants water for a few hours and gave them a bucket full of their dose of LSD and they drank it up. What a confusing world for those elephants. Yeah.

And they did act strangely, more so on the higher dose. And they showed some, like, minimal brief signs of aggression, probably just because they were like, what is happening. But it wasn't like a sustained super violent outburst the way must is. So he concluded that LSD did not incite a must-like state in elephants and therefore was not a useful research tool in this regard. But they also, like, they just. just didn't act very aggressive. They acted the way you would kind of assume elephants on acid wood. They, like, freaked out briefly and then just kind of, like, rocked around and, like,

walked funny. And, like, one of them, like, laid down for long enough that they were worried. But then they went over and, like, nudge the elephant, and it, like, got back up. It was like, fine. I'm fine. The ground just felt so good. Yeah. And then they didn't have any long-term ill effects.

So, you know, kind of like humans. As is true for all potential acid users, what matters is being careful about your dosage and having a good buddy to watch you on your trip, which these later scientists proved to be. So that's it. That's my story. Be a buddy for your high elephant's items. Don't give elephants acid. It's probably just a bad idea in general. But Barr feels so different right now. Okay, we'll take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back.

And Sarah, why don't you tell us about our most stuck in a bathtub president? Yeah, who I learned in the course of researching this, never got stuck in a bathtub. Aw. Yeah, he's the only, he's the only president who was also the chief justice of the Supreme Court. He was never stuck in a bathtub. He was famous for loving bathtubs. And when he like traveled down on a ship to go see the Panama Canal, he swore. He requested a giant bathtub

that there's this famous photo of four full-grown men sitting in a bathtub for him. So he was like a large man. He was an extremely big human. Yeah, but like extremely accomplished human and president and all we know about him is that he got stuck in a bathtub. And he's the last president to have facial hair. So William Howard Taft,

before we get into him, we're going to have a brief primer on how you make whiskey, which is that you start with some grain, mostly barley, and then you convert the starch into sugars, which we call malting, and then you turn the sugar into alcohol, which is fermenting, and then you distill it, so you, like, boil off the alcohol, and then some of the flavor compounds come over,

and at that stage, it tastes pretty bad. So you stick it in a barrel, usually an oak barrel, and then you just let it sit there. And over time, in a magical chemical reaction, the things that tasted bad turn into things that taste good. And then at least three years later, generally, you have whiskey. Wow. It's incredible. It's amazing. Why didn't you bring some for us to sample? I should have. I should have brought the maker's mark, but alas. But starting in the late 1800s, there was another option because we had invented artificial flavorings.

And so some clever people realized that what you could do was take a little bit of real whiskey, mix it with basically vodka, like some kind of neutral spirit, and then add some caramel color and some flavoring. and it tastes like fancier whiskey, and you can sell it for a much higher profit margin, because it's really cheap for you to make it. And they called this rectified whiskey, I guess, because they were fixing it. And apparently you could get, like, rectified versions of pretty much everything. They sold, like, bourbon essence and, like, old tom gin essence. And you could just, like, make any alcohol you wanted just by mixing, like, vodka and this flavoring. So this is, like, the booze equivalent of, like, the Coke syrup that goes into a soda fountain. Yes, exactly.

I kind of wish that they still existed as a thing. I was thinking like those little crystal light squirting things. Yes. Yeah, we should have this or like those Coke machines where you can combine any flavors that you want. Yeah, the freestyle machine. Yes. That would be so fun to have. But alcohol.

Yep, boozy freestyle machine. I would love this. Dear Coca-Cola. Yeah. But unsurprisingly, the traditional whiskey makers did not like it at all. Boom. Yeah, they felt that it was not real whiskey. But there was not a lot they could do about it because who got to decide what whiskey.

is. There was literally no law to say what whiskey was. It seemed briefly like maybe something would happen for them when Congress decided to start investigating the distilling and cattle feeding company, which was better known as the Whiskey Trust, because they sold like 90% of all the alcohol that was purchased in the United States. I was going to say, there was just one whiskey company? Just one, the Whiskey Trust. They were one of the original stocks on the Dow. They were so big. The case was like kind of. It was kind of complicated. Apparently they were sort of engaging in maybe some bribery so as to maintain their monopoly of whiskey and other alcohols. But the people making the case against them ended up basically just trying to make the argument that fundamentally the whiskey trust was just not to be trusted. They were just bad. Big whiskey. Yeah. Whiskey antitrust. And so the argument they make was they made that they were duping their customers into buying fake whiskey. But then that meant that they were basically asking Congress to decide, like, well, what is whiskey? Like, if this is fake whiskey, then what makes it real whiskey?

These are the real questions that Congress was created to answer. Yes, exactly. The important issues in 1895. Yep. Because it was extra confusing because the people making the case are basically saying, well, it's indistinguishable from real whiskey because that's why people buy it because it's indistinguishable. But if it's indistinguishable, then, like, isn't that whiskey? Like, it's a brown liquid and it tastes like whiskey.

It's got the chemicals that make it taste like whiskey and there's not just whiskey. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, It's whiskey. Exactly. So they never really decided because in a strange twist of events, the main expert testimony was given by a man who was in a short selling scheme with a stock broker company to try to like take the whiskey truss down. So that didn't really go anywhere for them. But it stirred up all this controversy. And then later Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which was the major piece of legislation that got enacted after Upton Sinclair published the jungle, which of course was about all.

of the incredibly shady and frankly revolting practices in the meatpacking industry. And it's basically just like a truth in labeling law that says like you have to disclose certain things about your food products, like what is in them? Like, for instance, is there cocaine in your Coca-Cola? Is there a formaldehyde in your milk? Which was another thing that was happening. Yeah. So this was like a huge piece of legislation.

And in it they had to decide what is whiskey. And it was decided that whiskey was only traditional. whiskey. You had to ferment it and you had to mash it and you had to age it in barrels and that was the only thing that whiskey could be. If you added anything except water, like if you added a neutral spirit or flavorings or anything like that, that is not whiskey. That is an imitation or a compound, which unsurprisingly, people did not want to buy something to drink that was called a compound. So the rectifiers weren't happy about this. They didn't want to call their whiskey a compound. That wasn't appealing. So Teddy Roosevelt was present at the time and they basically

just like lobbied hard enough and were angry enough that they got the attorney general to consider their case and revise the law, but they got shut down. And they kept trying and they kept trying until our good man, President Taft, came into office. And with a bathtub full of whiskey. Precisely. He was a large man. His Solicitor General took it on at first. And then whatever decision the Solicitor General came to was so terrible that both sides were like, absolutely not. And they asked the president himself to decide about it because he was a lawyer and I guess he liked whiskey and so he personally heard the case and he laid down the law in what is called the Taft decision which says that you can call it straight whiskey if it's made from only grain so you can't add

you can add water to get it down to like a certain safe alcohol content basically but you can't add anything else you can only call it whiskey if it'll blind you exactly but But if you call it blended whiskey, that can be whiskeys blended with other whiskeys, but it can also be whiskey blended with other neutral spirits and things like that. No one was really happy about that, but I think at that point they had just asked so many people that they were like, well, the president himself has said it, and so we must abide by it. And that has literally been most of our definition of whiskey for the last 100 plus years. They did add like a stipulation that it has to be aged specifically in new barrels.

and there is like a specific range of alcohol content. But basically we're still going by what President Taft decided just personally was going to be whiskey. But the problem is that now science has kind of caught up to us. So we don't, no one's really making whiskey by like adding artificial whiskey flavor, although frankly they should make that and that should be a new thing. But they are making whiskey in many, many fewer months than like the three years than is standard. Like there is some whiskey now that is made in basically, a couple of weeks or even like there's a brand of rum that's made in six days. So like Cleveland

whiskey does it by putting the liquor in a big steel drum and then you throw a bunch of like oak staves in there and then they use very high pressure to push the liquor through the wood and like back out again. So you're just like doing the aging thing but really fast. It's an instant pot. It seems to work. Yeah. Exactly. And like I think it's Cleveland whiskey. He has like one, awards for how good their whiskey is. There's another place called OZ Tyler that does it with oxygen and ultrasound. A place called Lost Spirits uses, like, again, wood chunks, but then, like, heat and ultrasound. And you're basically just making the chemical reaction happen faster, which is really smart if you're a distiller.

Because if you make any aged alcohol, it's very hard to go with the market flow. So apparently Maker's Mark made all these headlines because they said that whiskey was getting so much more popular perhaps because of madmen. That's probably true. Yeah. Not not true. It's not not true. And in the wake of the popularity, because they aged their whiskey for so long, they were basically going to have to start watering down their alcohol to meet all of the demand for it. Okay.

Which is wild. But like it says like you have to be predicting demand like a decade from now, which is a silly thing. But if you could make your whiskey in a few weeks, that wouldn't be a problem. You would make a lot more money. But like again, all of the people who make like real whiskey are trying to argue, well, that's not really whiskey. But legally it is whiskey, except in Europe. Europe says it has to be, it has to be aged for three years in Europe to call it whiskey. So apparently in Europe this whiskey is not whiskey but here it is whiskey.

What do they call this other thing? I don't know, but you're not legally allowed to label it as whiskey. An imitation perhaps or a compound. I'm not really sure. But I just think this is so silly because like it's whiskey, though, right? I just, I don't see the argument to say that it must be aged for it to be whiskey. But then again, if you don't lay down. on a definition, then what is whiskey?

Wow. We don't know. It's just blended grain juice. Yeah. But then like, so was lots of things. I know. This is the problem. No, I zoned out for a second because there's this really cheap whiskey that my dad buys

and keeps in like the big plastic handle, you know, at home. And I just needed to know if it was blended so that I could lord it over him that it wasn't real whiskey. But it's real. But it is real. But also blended whiskey is real whiskey. Like lots of good whiskeys are blended whiskey. It's all real. If it tastes like whiskey, it is, and I think it's all silly. I mean, this doesn't taste like good whiskey.

Good whiskey and real whiskey are different issues. Yes. Wow. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? The pooping. Yeah. That was fast. It's always the pooping. Yeah. That was really fascinating. I wish there was a more definitive answer, but I love that for the people. People who are doing the poop in? It's very real. It's very real. 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 iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, T-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at pupside. Threadlist.com. Our show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, and our editors, Jess Bodey and Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Katty. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.

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