The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Sex Rafts, Garbage Birds, Girded Loins, Security Geese

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

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Get 20% off your first order now with code Weirdest. That's code Weirdest for 20% off. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe. If that happens, LifeLock gives you a U.S.-based restoration agent who will stick by your side from start to finish. Phone calls, filing documentation, preparing insurance claims, your agent handles it all. In fact, we're so confident, restoration is guaranteed. Pour your money back.

Isn't it nice to have someone like that on your side? Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Hey, weirdos. Rachel here with a few important updates. First, the episode you're about to hear is from a live stream show we recorded in front of a small audience at caveat in New York City back in September of 2021.

If you were in virtual attendance for that event, well, thanks for both your support and your patience. We'll be back with a brand new episode in just two weeks, but I know for a fact that several tens of thousands of you did not purchase tickets to that live event. No shame, but I'm banking on this content being pretty fresh for most of you. Just a heads up that, of course, as always, the sound quality is a little different for a live event, though still pretty exceptional thanks to the technical expertise of our friends at caveat. And of course, our wonderful producer Jess, and that we make a few references to photos that we won't be linking to. Everything is either described sometimes too well by our hosts or is readily,

easily Googulable, so I hope you'll forgive us just this once. Because listen, September of 2021 was a long time ago and a lot has changed since then. Just because I haven't said it on the air yet, My time as executive editor at Popsai has come to a close, but weirdest thing is not going anywhere. So if you see me hawking my wares as a freelance editorial consultant, whatever that means on Twitter or LinkedIn or what have you, just know that that does not mean I will stop hosting the weirdest thing I've learned this week anytime soon. Of course, no one knows what the future holds, but Jess and I intend to be in this for the long haul. Speaking of the future, we don't have another Weirdest Thing live show planned at the moment, but I did want to take a second to invite you all to a live reading I'll be doing on December 5th. It's a free event at Niagara Bar in Manhattan and we'll link to the details in the show notes. I hope a few of you will stop by and say hi. If you want to keep tabs on what me and Weirdest Thing are up to, you can check out my link tree in this episode's show notes. You can click over to my website, you can buy my audio,

You can check out my TikTok account full of weird facts. You can subscribe to my newsletter full of weird facts. And you can even check out a T public shop that, for legal reasons, has nothing whatsoever to do with the weirdest thing I learned this week. But it does have a lot of weird things in it. All right, time for me to shut up and let you enjoy this very special sort of live show episode. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Wow. I'm going to do the intro for the show in the second. It's just not going to overlay the music because I didn't do it. it fast enough. Also, I just realized that the first page of my notes didn't print out, so if somebody could grab my phone from the green room before I called them, I would really appreciate it.

But we're doing it live. So, welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week. We are so psyched to be live from Caviot, our favorite venue in New York City. It is so much less depressing than us trying to do a live show sitting in front of our computers and our houses. So quick thank you a caveat for keeping things safe and believing in science and making it through a really tough 18 plus months. And we are excited to be able to have all of you here in person soon. But for now, I am going to introduce my co-host, one of whom is going to bring on my phone, so I have all of my notes.

And first, we are going to start with my favorite amorphous trash monster, science writer, naturalist, Ryan Mandelbaum. Please talk. Thank you. Wow, thank you. Next, the editor-in-chief of Popular Science, Karin-Eosio. And last but not least, one of our wonderful science team members at Popular Science, Data Visualization, Mastermind, and Frequent Weirdest Thing, host Sarah Chodosh.

How's everybody doing? doing? What have we been up to for the last year? I don't know. It's Tuesday though. I don't ever, I never know how I'm doing on Tuesday. I never know what day it is. That's true. I don't know what year it is. 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 we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first, or which one was first in the PowerPoint arbitrarily. 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. Sarah, what's your tease? I will be talking about the sex raft. The sex raft. The sex raft. The one, the only? The only one. All right, well, you know, bold claim, but we'll see where it goes.

Corinne, what's your tease? I'm going to talk about what Chinese police, the goddess Juno and Scotch whiskey have in common. Fascinating, as always. Can't wait. Ryan. Birds who love garbage. Wow, on brand. I love this for you.

Okay. Well, based on how I'm feeling and also nothing but that, I think we should start with Sarah's fact. This is all very spontaneous. How wonderful and how convenient that I also happen to be holding the clicker. All right. So this is the sex raft. I'm just going to start by saying that the creator of the sex raft would be quite annoyed that I'm calling at the sex raft.

So apologies to him. Thankfully, he is dead, so he does not know. I was going to say he's not here, but yeah, well, either way. Santiago Genovace was an anthropologist from Mexico who studied violence as in like the human propensity for violence and was also extremely familiar with long raft trips because he had gone on Thor, Hyerdahl's Ra, 1, and 2, which, if you do not know, were two fairly wild and extremely

controversial trips on rafts just across the ocean to see if he could. And he did. He went from South America to the Tuomotu Islands and also from Africa to Barbados. What he proved is somewhat up for debate, but he did make it.

But Santiago was a little bit more interested in people than the raft itself. So in the early 1970s, he decided that he was going to create, I would say, a powder keg on board a raft. Basically, he took 11 people from different parts of the world, different backgrounds. They were all attractive, I guess to him. Wow, I love a very ethical start. Yeah, attractive by some metric. and then he was going to put him on a raft with no privacy and nothing to do

and then results, I guess. Then a reality TV show? Yeah, I'm sorry, just to clarify, he had no hypothesis. Was the hypothesis just if you put hot people on a raft, they'll beg? So, kind of. Okay, I guess that's better than no hypothesis.

I just wanted to know how shoddy this experiment was. If we're being honest, I don't know that there was a hypothesis. It was sort of like if you put hot people in a stressful situation with no privacy, will they bang or will they fight or will they do both? So like every reality show ever. I mean, honestly, this could have been a reality show in 1973. I want to know if there was like an ethical review board for like Survivor now. God. I think a lot of Survivor would not have happened if there had been.

I don't know there was an ethical board reviewing this experiment. the university later tried to distance themselves from the whole thing. I bet they can't imagine why. Yeah. So the 11 people, two of them I couldn't find information on. One was obviously Genovese. Then there was a Catholic priest from Angola. A scuba dive.

What? Yep. Yep. No. Yep. He was there. A scuba diver from France. A ship captain from Sweden.

A waitress from Alaska. A photographer from Japan. A doctor from Israel. a restaurateur from Cambridge, I think the UK, but I don't actually know. An engineer, also from the U.S., two other people who have been lost to history. So we built ourselves a nice little community. Yeah, extremely multicultural. And then Santiago put the women in the most important roles

because he thought that maybe that would cause some tension with the men. So the medic, the captain, and the diver were all women. and the raft we're just going to go ahead and click forward nothing gets people going in terms of aggression and sexuality like women having jobs

yeah or like they were the most qualified people to do those jobs but he felt that that was still going to create conflict so this was the raft there was you can see like a small cabin they all slept in there it's pretty much just one room

There's really no privacy to speak of. The bathroom was a hole. Just a hole to the ocean. That's it. So sex had to be out in the open. I don't really feel like he created a sexy environment, but there was nothing to read. They were not allowed to bring any books.

There are no motors, you might notice. They were crossing the Atlantic, just to be clear. It's a long trip. And they were sailing towards the Caribbean just in time for hurricane season. So destined for a good time, it took them 101 days. to cross and they actually mostly got along. I was gonna say it a good time, not a long time,

but that's a long time. A long time and probably not a very good time. I just wanna make sure we didn't drop that last part for the whole first part. Yeah, so for the first part, it went pretty well. You know, they got along. Apparently they did have some sex. You had to do it at night when you were on watch.

Someone was watching, someone was steering. So as long as you kept one hand on the rudder, you could do it, and apparently they did. And they hung out alone and they filled out weekly psychological questionnaires that Santiago gave them. And then they just kind of chilled. But that wasn't interesting. Those aren't results, I guess. And Santiago got a little bit impatient.

He wanted something to happen. So he decided to start reading the questionnaires out. He told them they were private, but he did just go ahead and share them with everybody just to see if that might stir up like more attention. This was a word. It's literally a reality show. And then he also decided that maybe he should put them into some mortal danger.

So when they heard there was a hurricane coming on, the ship captain, who again was a woman who was extremely qualified and said, we should pull into port because a hurricane's coming. And this was their ship. Like this would not survive a hurricane. We should definitely pull into a port that they fortuitously were passing. And he said, no, why would we do that?

Why would we go to safety? So he led a mutiny, took over, and refused to go to port, and they only survived because the hurricane, like, veered off at the last minute. I want to take back my comparison to Survivor and say this is actually like the Hunger Games. But, yeah, it feels like he didn't want them to make it alive to their destination. It also, there's a scene in Jaws 2 that looks exactly like this, so that's kind of what I'm thinking. Yeah, it feels very Jaws-esque. That's Santiago, by the way, up there in the upper right carrying something. How is there not been a movie about this?

Has there been a movie about this? I think it was Charles, too. Fair point. There was a documentary and they found the people who are still alive who were on the raft and interviewed them on a life-size replica of the raft, and I'm not sure whether that was a particularly nice idea. But anyway, basically, Janivace went somewhat crazy. He had a little bit of like a heart of darkness moment.

And he only really like relented when they were directly in the path of a very large container ship ship ship captain who again, extremely qualified and he had put in charge originally said, okay, this is over, and sent up some flares and saved all of their lives. And then the crew members discussed whether they should just murder Santiago and throw him into the ocean. So it is, okay, this is the hunger games. It is all of the things that we thought. Yeah, they literally discussed, like, if they all stabbed him at once, then they couldn't, any individual person could not be culpable. One 12th of a murder each. Exactly.

Was this on April 15th? It should have been. but they didn't kill him. They just decided that he could just like lie alone in the dark in the cabin by himself. And he went into a deep dark spiral and said he cried for the first time since childhood. Well, that's his problem. You should cry sometimes. I think if you haven't cried since childhood, that's how you end up launching a sex raft experiment.

And also having merely killed 10 people twice, probably you should cry about that. Yeah, no, absolutely. He should have had therapy before he did the sex raft. That would have been helpful, yes. That's really the bottom line of a lot of. of experiments from this time in scientific history. It's very true. It's very true.

They should have had therapy. Think of the people who could have been saved if more men had gone to therapy. But the thing is, like what I think is very interesting about the story is that I assumed the end of my fact was going to be this, was like, what a ding dong this man was. What was he doing? What a silly experiment? What a like terrible time for everybody involved. But there's like kind of weird twist where,

He actually did have a revelation in the cabin all alone and realized that he was the only person who was causing all of the mayhem on board. And then he dedicated the rest of his academic career to proving that violence was not innate in people, because clearly he had proved it with 101 days at sea. He signed the Seville statement on violence, which was like an international statement

about how violence is not an innate part of humanity and people are inherently cooperative and wonderful to each other. Except for him. Except for him. He was terrible. But he actually originally called this the Peace Project. It was newspapers who branded it as the sex raft,

especially because they thought it was very funny also that all the women were in charge. And I guess the ship captain was blonde and attractive. And so they were like, what a good joke that this lady is in charge of this boat. And, you know, it was the middle of the ocean, so, like, everyone packed shorts and T-shirts, and they were scantily clad, and that was apparently very risque.

So, like, the newspaper is called at the sex raft, and everyone kind of, like, misunderstood the lesson. I feel like, including the documentary, that everyone is just, like, the sex raft. It's, ah, what a good joke. And actually, the lesson we should take is, like, literally 10 people were set adrift on a raft in the middle of hurricanes, he seized across the Atlantic Ocean,

with a man who was trying to kill them. and they all came out of it and seemed to have a pretty good time. They chose not to stab him. They didn't stab him. I would have. I would have killed him. But yeah, they all, like, banded together, and they had a nice time, which probably should have been expected, because you're selecting a group of people who voluntarily went on a raft

to cross the Atlantic Ocean with a bunch of people they didn't know, like, that you're selecting for a person who's naturally curious. So we almost understand the sex raft. I feel a little bit bad, like, making this. the tease, the sex raft, because I feel like I'm just doing exactly what all the newspaper headlines did. But yeah, it's a- But you brought it around. I know. I brought it around to a heartwarming place in the end. Wow. Wow. The sex raft. The sex raft. Beautiful. Thank you, Sarah. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door?

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I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has delta9 THC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Well, thank you. Oh, wow.

I forget that there's applause when we do this in person. I know. Oh, my gosh, people. Yeah. Thank you, by the way, to our friends and Popside family who are here in person. We wish that more of you could be here. But again, you know, next time, hopefully, when things are safer. But thank you to our partners and friends and colleagues who are here.

so that we are not talking to dead air, which makes this a lot more fun. Ryan, do you want to talk about trash birds? Yeah, this is totally random that I'm the next one to speak and not playing it at all. Spontaneous. So I'm just going to say my fact up front. The world's most notorious landfill is now home

to one of New York's rarest breeding bird species. And now you're going to learn about garbage and birds for like 10 minutes. Buckle up. So this is Fresh Kills Landfill, formerly known as Fresh Kills Landfill, It's at the furthest reaches of New York City over in Staten Island. This was originally very valuable wetlands.

It was planned by Robert Moses, of course. Famous, you know, crap head of ruining good things. Open in 1948, and of course it was only supposed to be open for three years. That didn't work. It was the largest landfill in the world from 1955 until 2001. Finally more than three years. A lot of garbage. 29,000 tons of residents.

thousand tons of residential waste per day went into this landfill. And at its peak, it was the, actually, it was the only landfill to accept residential trash from New York City. But it ended up being over 150 million tons of trash that went into these mountains of trash. And one person said it was among the largest human-made structures in the history of the world, which I think is just inspiring. I'm just going to say, I'm really glad that we accomplished something. Like, if you're going to be the worst, be the best. Also, sorry, this isn't in Staten Island, right? Yes, this is Staten Island.

Just like, no wonder Staten Island is like what it's like. They literally took all the garbage. We put this there. And I mean, Robert Moses was like, well, I'm just going to build a park here in like three years. And I was like, dude, you just took garbage and made a mountain out of it. So yeah, there's another view of garbage. Just I'm going to talk more about garbage. So it did close eventually, you know, in 2001, so a lot longer than three years.

because Staten Island filed a lawsuit against the landfill because they were like, there's too much garbage, please know. It did reopen in 2001 and ended up accepting most of the debris from the 9-11 attacks. But then finally, they were like, all right, this is over. It's done being a garbage heap. Now it's going to be like a garbage heap we don't put garbage into anymore. So the city ended up selecting a proposal, and in 2003,

to turn it into not garbage anymore. And then construction began in 2008. So that's what it looks like now. it actually isn't a garbage heap anymore. So when it's done, it's going to be the second largest park in New York City, three times the size of Central Park, 2,200 acres, and it'll be open in 2036. But now, let me tell you about how turning garbage into a park works.

This is really interesting to me and maybe not a lot of other people, but I'm going to do it anyway. Wow, I love that. I love you opening with that. It's great. I love garbage. Okay, so first, you have a huge pile of garbage. that's not very slightly, so you have to put down soil to level everything out, make it smooth,

make it look like a nice hill. Then you have to put a gas venting layer. So the thing about garbage is that it also has pollution. There's leachate, which is like gross water with all the garbage chemicals in it. And then there's also like methane gas and all that stuff. So they have a venting layer to remove the gas. Actually, the gas goes to power homes in Staten Island. Isn't that cute?

Wow. I love that. Staten Island literally powered by trash. Yeah. Well, trash gas. Same thing. Then there's of course a plastic liner to keep the trash in, as well as a drainage layer to ensure that water pressure doesn't cause any issues on the trash. There is a barrier protection layer, which is further soil to prevent any cracking in the bottom layers.

Finally, planting soil, and then of course seeds. Then there's soil, they have this special soil that they're supposed to make everything smooth and nice and have plants grow on it, and then they have native grass that they seed it with. But I'm not here just to talk about garbage. I'm here to talk about birds. always here to talk about birds. I have a photo of a bird here. This is not the bird I'm talking about, but I thought you'd like to enjoy a photo of a bird. This is what it looks like. It's grasslands. So this is actually really cool. It looks like a screensaver. It's great. Oh, yeah, I guess it does. It looks like, window XP. I was like, oh, no, it's not working anymore. I saw, I knew the second

I saw your face that you thought I meant there's a screensaver on the PowerPoint. No, no. But no. It actually looks exactly like the Windows XP login screen. Yeah. It's very big call it. Yeah. But, so this is actually really cool because it's not just like a new, like, when you think Central Park, it's like woods and like a forest and it's like, okay, whatever. But this is not woods. It's actually a vast grassland. And so grassland habitats have been declining faster than any other habitat species suite in the northeastern United States. And then the total population of grassland birds has declined more than 40% since 1966. But this is what Fresh Hills looks like.

It's a grassland. So it's actually not just like a big park, but it's actually like this huge swath of like, endangered habitat. And so a lot of cool garbage birds came and bred there. I have a list of birds here, Vesper Sparrow, Grasshopper Sparrow, the largest grasshopper sparrow colony in New York State. Ospreys, black ducks, just like a lot of birds. Other really cool birds are there. But this is cool, but old news. The New York Times was on it in 2016. And anyway, these are not the birds that I'm interested in. I'm talking about sedge wrens. So sedge wrens are this like really weird and interesting little bird. I also have one on my shirt. I just thought you'd all like to know

that I'm wearing a shirt to the theme. I love that. You're also wearing bird earrings. Oh, yes, the earrings I'm wearing. I think one is a Clapper Rail, which is a, and the other one's a piping plover, which I specifically selected because they both breed in New York State. Wow. Coordination. So this is a Sedgren. Sedgren's really interesting because they actually breed way up in Minnesota, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, in the first half of the year, but then in the second half of the year, they sort of disperse

all over any place they can find grass kind of south and east of there. And of course, because grasslands, as I said before, like one of the most threatened habitats in the United States, the bird is also endangered or threatened in nine states in

the United States, so that's no good. But they're cute. And so actually, New York once had a lot of grassland. The Sedgrain was once a widespread breeder in the northeast, but actually now it's rarely seen in the northeast aside from parts of Quebec and then parts of like really far northwestern New York. They were extirpated. They bred in New York City and Long Island in the marshes until like 1960-ish.

And of course they are also threatened in New York State, as we don't have a lot of grassland anymore. But let me tell you about a little landfill. So then on August 6th of 2020 at 11 a.m. exactly. Birdbanders, Jose Ramirez Garofalo and Shannon Curley, spotted this very bird, just a meter from their bird banding net. They weren't very happy about that. They kind of wished it would go into the net.

He didn't. He sat there in that spot and he ended up singing for six hours. Sorry, what's up bird bander? Oh, bird banders are people who put up nets in places where there are birds, and then the birds kind of fly into the nets. and then they put little rings around them so that later people can be like, oh, I have the ring.

I know where this bird came from because the bird banders put a band on it. Oh, it's those little enclets. So it's for like tracking, migration. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dispersing. Shee counts. Totally. So they were doing that because they have like

the biggest grassland habitat and whatever. Everybody's really excited about it. But then like this guy shows up and they're like, oh, crap, that's a rare bird. We never see that here. What's going on? So he's like singing for, hours, and they're like, not only is he randomly here, but he's also, like, singing a lot.

Then at 3.30, a second bird is there, and they're like, well, this is really interesting. August 12th, the birds are discovered building a nest. And then finally, on September 16th, researchers confirmed the first of three fledgling sedrans in New York City. First time since 1960s that they successfully bred here. A little round of applause for the sedge rent. Good job, little guys. I love the, like, hour. by hour play by play of this courtship between two birds. It was beautiful. I thank you, Jose and Shannon, for letting me

read do their paper. But I was reading the paper. And I was just like, oh my God, did they do it? Did they breed? Are their babies? And the paper was like very dramatic. It was awesome. So you did not read the abstract first?

I read the whole paper. I was like, I got to know about these birds. But yeah, this is awesome, because it was the first New York City breeding record of these birds in 60 years, despite the fact that humans kind of moved in, this is actually weird, because normally, when humans move into a bird habitat, the birds are like, oh, we don't want to be here anymore.

And these birds are like, oh, trash dump. That's cool. It also demonstrates the excess of this ecological restoration at Fresh Kills. And I mean, I don't want to say that, like, we don't want to build more landfills. That's obviously bad. But there are 1,900 inactive landfills in New York State.

And obviously, like, we've got these rare birds that are all showing up here. So maybe like grasslands is a good idea for what to do with a landfill. And then there's a happy, and even happier ending to this story. That was all in 2020, and in 2021, just right now, they are currently back reading once again.

How many hours have you spent going there trying to see them? They're not allowed in. The park doesn't end until 2036. But one day I will lay eyes on, there's like the photos here. I've sort of selected photos. Like I took that one somewhere else. But yeah, this is a photo of the actual bird.

No, not that one. This is the actual bird. This is the actual bird. And then this is this year's bird. So these are their photos. And then some of mine to just brag. Beautiful. So they're just sedge runs are garbage birds.

And we love that for them. We're rooting for them. Yeah. Oh, man. I'm a garbage bird, too. Wow. Well, so we're going to take a short break in a minute before getting on to some other activities and then some more facts.

But our colleague, Perbita, is monitoring the YouTube chat. Any interesting stuff going on, Perbita? Oh, great. We love that for them. Lots of other people identify as garbage birds. Yes, that is our target demographic. Thank you. We'll make T-shirts.

So people are asking why is it the park? So people are asking why the park is open until 2036. I just don't want to assume you can hear what's happening. Yes. There's just a lot of work that they have to do. They've only capped, they haven't capped. all the, there's like four giant mounds that they have to cap, so they have to do that. They're opening it in stages, so there is like a little piece of the park that's open, and then until 2036, they are offering like limited tours if you go on their website.

So I don't know if they have a tour right now to see the sedrens, but they did run a tour last year so that people could see the sedrans. And the sedren seemed to be okay with it because they had babies. Yes, that seems like a fair assessment, you know. No questions on Sarah. Exactly what I was hoping for. No questions on Sarah Segment, but lots of innuendo. Which, yeah, I think is understandable.

You were very thorough. You didn't leave a lot of stones unturned, but it is a sex route. No, and it's also like there are just too many jokes. We don't want to ruin them all for people. We want them to find them themselves. That's so true. I tried to leave some material for the people. I would really like to be in that chat right now.

Like, that's where I really shine. So I'm sad I can't be there with you all. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much? Did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton for the stay. Gear editor, the illustriest, Stan Horaceek. erstwhile Weirdest and Contributor is here to humiliate us with a game Also You want to come up on the stage

Yeah Also Stan I forgot to tell you this before the show But I caught a glimpse Of one of your slides And one of them is related to My Fact and the book I wrote About

So if you can guess which one that is Based on what the book I'm writing is about don't make that one of my questions. Okay. Thanks. If by that you mean just do exactly what I was going to do because I'm not smart enough to change on the fly. That's fine.

I just, I needed to make everything. Just start screaming and know when that one comes up. It'll be fine. Now I'm tall. I don't know if anyone can see me. I'm going to use the mic stand like Stephen Tyler. Yes. So my name is Stan Horacek.

I'm the senior gear editor at Pop Photo, or Pop Photo, great. popular science. And also, like, you also just have a pop photo. It's true. And I am here to test the limits of what Rachel calls a fun little game. It's going to be little. It's going to suck.

I don't know how fun it's going to be. But, you know, I've sort of been a sporadic guest on the podcast, but I've been kind of a fixture here at the live show when it comes to providing the halftime entertainment. And for this, today's game, I want to sort of dive back into, like, the history of weirdest thing and, like, figure out. what kind of content really stuck with me. And usually it's the kind of stuff that makes me feel physically uncomfortable.

And I figure we're in spooky season now, so we're just really gonna lean into the physical uncomfortableness of weirdest thing. And in the history of weirdest thing, nothing has ever made me feel more uncomfortable than this stupid thing, which I don't know if you guys have heard that episode, but to describe this, I think I can just

read what Claire Maldarelli wrote about it. The creators of the chainsaw were two Scottish surgeons named John Aitken and James Jaffrey. They developed their gnarly and dangerous device to help them do their jobs, cutting human bone and flesh, which is both beautiful and cannibal corpse lyrics, depending on how you do it. So in order to build off this theme, what we're going to do is I'm going to show you well, the people on stage, I'm going to show you pictures of really horrific looking old medical devices. You're going to have to tell me what they were meant to treat.

You don't have to get the name because some of the names are inscrutable. And honestly, like, there's no one to check my power here. So it's going to be like Olympic figure skating and I'm the French judge. So if you get close enough, then you'll win. Also, there's no prize, so it doesn't matter. Just with left of our dignity. We get to keep it. This game format is really very close to my heart because long-time weirdest thing listeners will know that one of our earliest facts for me was me talking about smoke enemas, which my inspiration for that was us being at the Science Friday trivia show and a picture of this object came up.

And I leaned over to Corinne and I said, that goes in a butt. And that's when we became friends. Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, I, so I, you know, it really, it feels like it really hardens the back to weirdest thing history. Did you win that trivia? Oh, yeah. Congrats. We win every year. We crush the trivia. So if you are, don't have your legs crossed already. I might recommend it because this is a very uncomfortable. It's going to get real uncomfortable, real fast. Sarah, you're closest to me. So we're going to let you go first. What I do ask is that for the sake of both accessibility and comedy, that since some people can't see the images we're looking at, if you would just quickly describe what it is we see. on the screen. Okay.

Really going to put you on the spot. So this is question number one, and this is your, Sarah. You have to tell me what that is. I mean, I'm feeling, wait, I have to describe it first. You do have to describe it. Okay, so it kind of looks like a,

part of it looks like a bick lighter, but fancy with flowers. And then there's sort of an arm and a nozzle, and then a long piece of something. That's perfect.

That's exactly how I would describe it. A hose, perhaps. A very aggressive vape. It looks like a hose, but stiff somehow. All right. Do you want to make a guess as to what it is? I'm going to be honest,

all I can think of is smoke enema. This is, you get partial credit, I'm not going to keep score. Does it go in a butt? It's a regular enema. It's a decorative ename. I mean, come on.

That's clearly said, But to me, the end there, right? I wanted to start us off with something that wasn't objectively horrible, but it's going to get really horrible. But also this picture specifically... I did look at that, and I thought that goes in the butt. Yeah, I mean, come on. As I often think. This picture specifically comes from a museum collection in London, and I thought it would be really awesome

if the person who put that in their butt long ago knew that it would someday be in a museum. That's just kind of be a really comforting thought. I mean, I love that they bother to make it fancy. you know? Yeah. They treat themselves. Yeah. You got nice. We just spruce it up a little. It's much nice. I wish they still sold enemy kids like this. There's definitely some house, like some beautiful 18th century

mansion where this is just sitting there and everybody's like, this is so beautiful and they don't know what it does. Yeah, of course. Yeah. They're not, but there's an Etsy show. This is an Etsy shop waiting to happen. So all of you entrepreneurs out there. So Sarah, Sarah, I have no idea how many points you got. But question number two. All right.

Oh, okay. Corinne. All right. Well, this is a technical draw. We have something that looks, many things that look like spears. There's something that maybe sort of looks like a needle. And then the one on the bottom is a little bit troubling. It's like a needle and it has a, you know, just a geometric protuberance coming out of it. And I just feel like we're supposed to scrape things with what's going on here. I like these words.

They're getting more horrible by the thing. It just, it feels extractive. The one second from the top has kind of a spermy look. Oh, it does on the front. It's got that little tail. He's a little swimmer. You can do it, buddy. You got to make a guess so I don't get kicked off the stage.

I mean, I'm your boss. You don't get to tell me what you do. It's true. So I'm, I don't know. This is for tonsillectomies. Close, but much worse. This is, Rachel, if you know how to say this word, lithotome, is that right?

Okay. I just assume. I don't know what that says about my relationship that I assume you know how to say really horrible surgical tools. You know, it's fair. It is a surgical knife used during the perennial lithotomy to remove bladder stones. Oh, it's going to say it doesn't go to urethra,

that would be my guess. Oh, my God. The instrument has a concealed blade which opens when a lever is depressed on the handle. It is used to widen the perennial wound, and then it's inserted through the perennial wound into the bladder. So it doesn't go through the urethra,

No, okay, because I was full on in that scene in Deadwood that's really upsetting. I'm so sorry to everyone. It's going great. Aren't you guys happy that you let me do this? Wow, this is so much worse than I thought it was going to be. Ryan does not look prepared for his turn. Remember when I used to host games about technology and gadgets? Wasn't that fun?

Okay, Ryan, ears is actually pretty calm. It looks like a nuclear weapon, like Fat man, like a bomb that a woman is laying down inside of somehow. This has got to be some sort of compression chamber for squeezing, in my opinion, based on what I'm looking at. Let's just say it's a big magnet. It's a magnet. It's actually close.

It's a rotating cobalt machine, which had cobalt in it, and it was. would swing around the patient, and it actually was sort of an early form of radiation therapy. I got it exactly right. And this form of therapy still does work. It does happen in some places in a much more reasonable-looking machine, but it's been replaced in a lot of places by much more. Does she seem quite short to anyone else? Like part of her middle is missing?

It's just, it's... I think it's the angle, sort of weird foreshortening. Yeah, I'm having that, like, magician woman in a box thing happening in my brain. So, Cobalt machine. Okay. Rachel, this one is yours. Do you want to describe it for us in all of its glory?

Yeah, so it's kind of, it almost looks like a little bit like like a telescope, but like a small handheld one that like a pirate would use. It's sort of a multi-tiered cylindrical object, but that at the end, it has a little

stabby bits that kind of look like maybe when you extend it, the stabby bits go in and out. That's my description. That's a very good description. What do I think this is for? Is it like an early inoculating device?

So this is called an artificial leech and was used for bloodletting. It's just for... That was my first guess. And then I was like, be more creative, Rachel. It's more than just a stabby machine, but it was literally just a stabby machine. Yeah, I think you should get because you said stabbing machine.

Frankly, I think all of us are just bursting at the seams with blood and could use a little bit of this at the moment. Too much. So I'm going to go through the next ones pretty quickly so I can get back to the actual show. So we'll go rapid fire here. Sarah, this is yours. I fear this is for pulling something out of someone. Is it? It's worse than that.

Describe it first, Sarah. Okay, so it kind of looks like it's got a cross shape. and there's some things that clearly rotate, like little handles. It reminds me of those corkscrews that are shaped like a man. It does. It looks like a corkscrew, but instead of a corkscrew, but instead of a corkscrew, there's like a long wire with a loop on the end. That's the money part.

Yeah, I can see that, yes. Is it for like a biopsy? Tell me if it's for something normal. If you had gotten it, I would have felt worse about this, because this is called a tongue gracior and is used to remove part of the tongue affected by disease. And they essentially put it through that wire

and then Tony Soprano choke part of your tongue off. That's not necessary. I think you could just, if you're taking part of your tongue off. Well, you could make that part very hot. So sorry, it's a little. Oh, no. No.

Yeah. Wow, I'm finding it very difficult to talk all of a sudden. Remember when we were talking about sex raft? I'm doing so much fun, but that's just me. All right, so. Yeah, you're in your element right now. Corinne, this is yours. Okay.

Oh, I know what that is. Oh, hello, right. Well, we have something, it looks, it's a kit, right? We're in a nice little piece of luggage here, a nice wooden box, and there's a thing that looks like a bellows and a thing that, you know, looks like the thing that you use to take snod out of a baby's nose and various attachment type stuff. And I feel...

Nozzles, even. Nozzles, yes, thank you. I'm good with words. I mean, I feel like the obvious answer is smoke enema, but I'm not going to say that. Yeah. No, you should say that

because it's the right answer. I should say that because it's a smoke enema. No, that was one of the other weirdest thing that really stuck with me is that, like, man, if I keel over and die, I really hope someone runs over and pumps smoke into my butt. So I can come back to life.

If anyone watching has not listened to the Smoke Gimba episode, it was, I think, the second episode. And it haunts me to this day. It's very good. Okay, ring up two more, Ryan. Oh, yeah, that's obvious what that one is. I'm sorry. I'm so uncomfortable.

So this one, I'll just describe it as it looks kind of like a bear trap that doesn't shut with another sort of ring inside of that. This must be for amputations of some sort. We're just going to say, I'm just going to go all out. It's for penis amputations. Oh, that's actually close. Sort of. This is actually for treating a condition called spermataria.

Nailed it. It was for preventing the, quote, involuntary loss of semen. It's a clamp? I actually know the proper name for this device, but it's, going to come up later. Yeah. Sorry, I hope it didn't up too much on it. I saw this and winced very hard, so I figured I should show it to all of you

here in this room. There's actually, if you search for this thing, which is called a jugum penis. I don't know who named it that. It feels pretty awful. Make sure you spell it right. A jugum penis. If you search for it, an image will come up

where a hot dog is placed inside it to replicate a penis. this. That sounds like a great take-on. And I may never sleep again. So wait, I understand, I just want to know more about this. So I understand.

I can talk more about it later. Oh, really? I get to learn about it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Please hold your follow-up to the end. Okay, so now we go to the last one. What do we do with this? Okay, so what we're looking at,

it kind of looks like a speculum that's then attached to some pokey bits in a way that I don't like. So it's kind of, you've got something that almost looks like a pair of tongs, but then it extends. And there's kind of another parallel bar. And then, yeah, some pokey bits. It's like the angriest silverware you've ever seen. Yes, very angry silverware.

Indeed. Wow, it's really hard for me to get past the initial resemblance to a, essentially. speculum, but I don't think that's what it is. Is it for removing teeth? It is actually a hernia tool. Oh. It is used to pinch shut the hernia and then help encourage the development of scar tissue over the hernia area so that the scar tissue will hold it shut.

Okay. Forbidden Swiss Army knife. Yeah. I have no idea who's winning, so I have a tiebreaker. We're going to do it in one 30 seconds here. And whoever gets a tiebreaker right is the winner. It's a number. Whoever gets closest, Price is right rules.

What is the measurement of the biggest kidney stone of all time? Centimeters or inches? Inches. If you can convert it, then you can do centimeters. Was it passed naturally or did it have to be extracted surgically? Okay, I feel like that's very important to know. Okay. I'm going to say, wait, prices right rules?

Yes. I'm going to say 7.5 inches. Ryan, you want to take a guess? 14 inches. Wow, that is it. 11 and a quarter. Sarah. I'm going to go small and say five, hopefully.

Wow. Sarah, it's 5.11 inches. Wow. There you go. Sarah's the winner because I didn't keep score. I'm sorry and thank all of you. Dan, thank you so much for this in Chalood. delightful. I mean, I thought I was delightful, which probably means most people are

happening now, but that's what we do here. I thought it was great. I don't think we ever identified the first object that Claire talked about, which was the saw that was originally for childbirth. Yes. That's the only episode of the pot. I was on that episode. That's the only one where I felt physically ill. Yeah, that was a tough one. Yeah. Yeah, I had to take that one in chunks. Yeah. I'm sorry, I said chunks. For delivering children is what the saw was about. Obviously they were. Yeah. Commission comes in all shapes and 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.

So we're going to start in China. In 2013, a group of police stations in the Xinjiang region, which is a very rural region, received some interesting instructions about how they were to go forth using the geese that they had around. Traditionally, they had the geese around for eggs and eventually to eat them, because, you know, fowl can be very yummy, sometimes gamey, but also yummy. And the new instructions were that the geese were no longer to be used as food. The geese were their new night watch. And I'm so... They do look kind of terrifying, if I'm being honest. I mean, geese are terrifying. Geese are truly terrifying, and we're going to talk all about it.

You know, show me a child who does not have a formative memory. of a goose at a park, like trying to kill them. I'm baby and I love them. I'm so terrified to be presenting a bird fact next to Ryan. I'm like trying to out bird Mandelbaum and I'm horrified. But here we go. So these are their geese. And the geese were the early indications in a report in the China Daily that a lot of people

reblogged about were pretty good. The geese were very vigilant. A lot of the precinct captains were saying. they were excellent watch guards, they were very, very, very, very loud. This is an alarm that cannot be ignored. And when one of these geese starts a honkin, all of the geese start a honkin, and they won't stop until what they're honking about is gonzo, which is great. So they found that the geese actually did better than their cameras, than their closed circuit stuff. And the geese did better than dogs.

So to quote one of the police officers in the China Daily article, the geese never make mistakes. Never? Never. That is such a strong statement. It is an extremely strong statement.

Here is the one example they offered as proof. There was a fellow whose bike was impounded. I don't know why, but the police had it at the station. And he went and he wanted his bike back. The guards did not see him coming. He gave the guard dog a treat.

Granted, the treat had something in it, and the dog took a little nappy, but the dog was no longer a problem. The geese didn't shut up. You can't bribe a goose. You cannot. I know that from my incident. You cannot bribe a goose.

You can especially not bribe an angry goose who is acting as geese do. And naturally, we all know, like, this is a lot of how geese act. So how do we harness this power, right? Is this new? Is this innovative? Yes.

And no. These are the questions we have to ask. These are the questions. Is this a first? I must know if this is superlative, these geese. So we all know, geese are kind of assholes. And many of our person-to-person interactions with geese result in headlines like this.

geese are very territorial, they are very loud, they can be extremely aggressive. This, in the absence of any hard data on negative human on goose interaction, is a sampling of headlines from 2021. My favorite is the top from Scary Mommy, likening the nasty waterfowl, as they are known to be, to dinosaurs. Canada geese have serrated tongues, just something for all of us to sit with. unnecessary, you know? A tongue's not a thing that needs to be serrated. Why'd they do that? Have you ever walked by a Canada goose, like, at a park when they're on their nest or something?

Because it's, like, awesome. I mean, it's horrible, but it's awesome. It's horrible. When we were children, my brother was attacked. They literally sit there and their heads turn into like cobras, and they're just like, and you're like, what the hell? Oh, my God. The hissing. The hissing is truly, truly terrifying, right? So, chasing away, a guy had to be rescued in Edmonton. this is not goose on human crime, this is goose on goose crime. So two geese just really, really went to destroy each other in the outfield and interrupted a pre-season major league baseball game. Again, not goose on human crime, but I thought it was hilarious, so here you go.

It's so funny that that's like news. Like geese attack each other. It's like, okay. Yeah, this is very, I think this was the New York Post, so there you go. Or the daily news, whatever. What's the difference sometimes? And a Canada goose in New Jersey was really, really being unkind to folks at the parking lot of a diner in New Jersey, which is very Jersey. The United Capital of the World.

Yes, very Jersey, but also very goose. So the question is, how do we harness a goose's dickish tendencies for good? and this is not new, as we always find out. Let us go back to the Romans, because doesn't everything go back to the Romans? So around 390 BCE, the Romans were having a pretty bad time. The Gauls were beating them down very substantially. And they had run a lot of people out of Rome.

Tons of people had evacuated the city. and the armymen who remained in Rome took refuge at the top of the Capitoline Hill and were protected. They were fortified behind some really intense walls that the Gauls never really managed to breach. They made multiple attempts during the day. And eventually they were like, well, crap, this isn't working. Let's try going at night. So the Gauls go to attack at night. But what the Gauls didn't take into account that also on top of the camp,

Capitoline Hill in Rome, is the temple of the goddess Juno. And do you know what the sacred animal is of the goddess Juno? Is a goose. A goose. The goose were not having it. Can I just pause this right here and ask that everybody watching this online screenshot this, make memes out of it, and then tweet them at Rachel? Yeah, please.

Twitter at Rachel Feldman with a tea. So the goose woke up the guard. The guards fought back the Gauls. And all of this continued until the war was over. Rome was saved. Rome was saved by the geese. They renamed the Temple of Juno, the Temple Moneta, which is derived from the Latin word for warning.

These friends are your first guard geese. So, and there is still a bronze statue at the Capitoline Museum of a goose. We enshrine, we are so grateful to the geese for saving Rome. And as history moves on, as history tends to do, this is an idea that you don't really see much of until all of the sudden industrial guidebooks and manuals start suggesting to people that if they have a large property,

perhaps what they need as opposed to expensive security guards and dogs is just a shit ton of geese. The U.S. military. Go on. I was just going to say, you know what you get when you have a shit ton of geese? A goose ton of shit.

Oh, it is a goose ton of shit. So, of course, you know, not one to miss an opportunity. The U.S. military in the mid-80s around 1986 decided that they were going to take them up on this. And they wanted to deploy 900 of the honkers in platoons-sized six. to 40 at some 30 sites in West Germany as part of the U.S. Army's 32nd Air Defense Command. So sorry, they were going to fly the geese there?

I don't know. That's a very good question. Collected unless local geese? I mean, there are many species of geese that are good at this. I don't know. I don't know. But there are, perhaps there were local geese. Like, there isn't only one goose species, and it turns out there are many goose species that are pretty good at being guards.

There's African geese and Roman geese, a geese species called the Pomeranian, which, okay. And African geese, people tend to hew more towards the African and the Chinese geese because they are exceedingly loud, and people, especially like the African ones, because they are also gigantic. Wow, I was schooled on the geese. I can't believe I just remember it all that. Don't you feel silly? I love it. I mean, I'll love, but it's just so weird that they are weaponizing and invasive species.

There's some really deep stuff there I'm not ready to think about. Yeah, I don't know that the geese were ever intended to attack as much as worn. But yes, I take your point. Just be loud and flat. Just make them freaking miserable. Yeah, exactly like that. That's the idea. Yes.

That is an excellent depiction. So this is all happening with the U.S. military in like around 1986, the Time magazine reported on it. The Associated Press reported on it. And I found nothing about its success or failure after that. But you do find an interesting, like curious, but still, like, skeptical and dubious quote from one of the commanders of the U.S. Army at the time. Quote, we can't prove that anyone was scared away by the geese, but they make so much noise, it certainly is a possibility. So ringing endorsement for the geese.

But this is an important point in the goose story because of where the U.S. military sent someone on recon to learn how to deploy geese. This is the Ballantine Distillery in Scotland. These geese are known as the Scotch Guard. Excuse me, it's not the Scotch Guard. That's laundry stuff. This is the Scotch Watch, friends. No, you're right, that's laundry.

Yeah. I was thinking of Scotch tape. Scotch Guard is laundry. Sorry. You're totally fine. So this is the Scotch Watch, and the Scots Watch was originally deployed in 1959 when the Ballantyne proprietor moved his wares, his valuable, valuable wares onto 14 acres of property, again, extremely expensive to police in manual, non-technical ways that were not available in

1959. The Scotch Watch started off with six yeast, and their numbers eventually ballooned to close to 100. They had a goosekeeper on the grounds. there was a whole system designed to take care of these geese so that these geese could take care of what would become 300 million British pounds worth of blended scotch whiskey. And for a conversion for everyone that is in the conversion rate today,

$409 million worth of whiskey entrusted to our little friends. No thievery that we know of. since the geese were there. The geese became celebrities. They were in advertisements. Some of them flew to Los Angeles to make celebrity appearances. Like themselves?

Like they flew the whole way on their little goose wings? No, they were very special geese. They flew on airplanes and were like, what the hell? But I like the idea they were next to the airplane. Yes, just like, just show me the way. Let me sit on the wing and hang out for a second. So they were local celebrities. and also tourist attractions.

People became very, very attached to these geese, so much so that when one went missing, a little lady named Clementine, she decided she wanted to go for a swim in the river Clyde and got lost. They took out a pretty desperate newspaper advertisement to bring her home, and so famous were the geese in this area of Scotland

that somebody spotted her, they identified her, and they brought her back. That's like, sorry, but just like, Clementine of Ballantyneinine got lost, I'm out. I don't even want to finish after that. But, you know, modern technology being such as it is, eventually these geese were outmoded by 2011.

Their numbers were down to seven, and this is, this might be the last seven. I don't know. I was going to say those are seven geese. That is seven geese, a waddling. So they were retired and replaced by closed circuit. TV and cameras and all kinds of boring, modern technological stuff. In a way they went. I just love this little guy. It's like an in-memorium thing at the Oscars.

They didn't eat them though. They went. The Glasgow Humane Society took them in, which was very, very nice. But, you know, this was not the end of the guard geese because guard geese are still very much a thing. Guard geese are very much a thing for farmers and homesteaders. That guy on the the right, it's really, you can tell he's honking. So this is a family, right? This is a guard goose, a set of guard geese who have a family of chickens that they protect from intruders, from birds of prey, sometimes from snakes. The farmers really like the geese. They also do their weeding for them, which is great.

As long as, you know, everything is totally cool and chill. But like, why are geese good at this? So geese, and we'll just look at this goose eye for a second, I just love this picture. They have excellent vision. They actually see ultraviolet wavelengths of light, which humans don't do, but that's really only handy during the daytime. The geese are most effective at night because not only are they exceedingly light sleepers, but they hear extremely well. And once you set one goose off, you're going to set off a whole bunch of geese. And I wasn't able to find good decibel readings for this, but I did see recordings for geese up to 120. 20 decibels, which, as it happens, is as loud as a chainsaw.

So we'll just bring that right back around. They're also very territorial. Anything that they establish as their family, they're going to protect. They can establish Chinese police officers as their family, or the place that they work on protecting whiskey. And the respect goes both ways, because just as there is a bronze statue of a goose in Rome, there are these memorial statues of the Scotch Watch. Wow, we all brought around such heartwarming places,

and now I feel like Rachel's just really going to ruin it, and I love it. Yeah, mine doesn't come around to a heartwarming place at all. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199, and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.

While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy, or the price holds you back. Price Line is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars,

you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. As I have T-St online, I am sharing a fact for my upcoming book. I've been very careful not to talk about facts for my book on weirdest thing because it would be really easy for me to just use only facts for my book for the next year

and spoil the whole book, which is coming out in May. But I really have it on the brink. in because tomorrow I get my copy edits back and I'm about to spend two weeks living in hell. My agent is watching this and Jeff, thank you for all you do, but I wish I were dead. So I figured it would be a great time to talk about a passage from my book and all of the stuff I have learned therein. So let's get into it. What does, what do these three things have in common? Mel Brooks, the fact that white men can't jump, and chastity belts. The answer is that I was introduced to all three of them when I first saw Robin Hood, Men in Tights.

A 1993 classic. Wow, great stuff. And there is a chastity belt in this film. And I talked about it in my book because it really stuck with me. It's really this like at once disturbing and really. really, like, titillating thing, where it's not just that, like, Me and Marion is being protected from the dangerous men around her. She's also presented as this extremely horny character who, like, spends the whole movie being, like, desperate to get this thing off so she can get railed.

And I was probably, like, six years old when I first saw this film. Thank you, Mom and Dad. And that really, that really just, like, struck me. It also never struck me that it's an everlasting belt. Yeah, I know. I may say. I didn't realize that until I was like. looking up this picture. Mel Brooks, comedic genius. Anyway, so the thing is that Brooks was kind of onto something, we'll get to that in a second,

because chastity belts wouldn't exist if men weren't intrigued and aroused by this idea of female sexuality. So to be more accurate, actually, our idea of chastity belts wouldn't exist without men wanting to believe that women would get up to no good if they weren't walked away because chastity belts actually not a thing. Not real. Never happened. Didn't exist at all.

So why do we have these things? This looks pretty old. This looks real. So the idea that middle-aged maidens were forced to literally gird their loins. It goes far back enough into antiquity that it kind of has an air of truthiness even today. There are 16th century engravings and woodcuts that depict women in fortified undies. And then museums around the world also have specimens like this one made of iron that seem old enough to maybe be medieval chastity belts. We even have an illustration of a really frightening chastity device from the 1400s, the tail end of the Middle Ages, or the medieval times. Medieval times? Middle Ages. Anyway. from German military engineer Conrad Kaiser.

And he crafted this chome called the Bella Fortes, which was kind of like an illustrated guide to military tech of the day. And one of his pieces of military tech for some reason was a pair of iron breaches that he said Florentine women wore. And that was a chastity belt. And so a lot of people who are claiming that chastity belts existed in medieval times cite this as evidence, because that was contemporary. The thing is, he made it all up. He didn't cite his sources,

and also his guide to military tech also includes, like, an invisibility cloak. So no real reason to think that anything he said in there was true. And without that, we really only have references from, like, the 15th and 16th centuries and later that are, like, this cartoon, that are mocking husbands who are about to be cuckolded because you can't really see in this. I'm so sorry, but there's a spare key in the background.

So someone is about to go unlock that chastity belt that he is, you know, securely locking. So 16th century references to locking up one's lover were probably just kind of a symptom of something that we're still guilty of today, where we like to think of the era that came just before us as being really backwards. For example, we talk about the Victorian era as being really prudish when really they were having a lot of sex and making a lot of porn. And it's just very, for some reason it seems to be in human nature to say, like, oh, our great-great-grandparents, they didn't do anything fun. So it seems like probably in the 15th and 16th century,

they were just like, you know, back in the 1400, 1300s, they didn't bone. They did, demonstrably. And yeah, so all of the examples that you see in museums, like this guy, they're actually like 18th or 19th century fakes, we now know, and in fact, at least one museum

had to sheepishly relabel its chastity belts as dog collars after some time. And, you know, this isn't super surprising for anyone who has ever had to take care of a vulva because like personally speaking I would not wear a bathing suit for more than six hours if I didn't know I was going to have a reliable supply of monostat afterwards and before the age of antibiotics and antifungals an unremovable chafing unbreathable metal device would have literally killed people and also can you just go back for a second is that serrated like what's going on there

okay that's all that makes it worse that's all I'm saying Anyway, yeah, once you try to think of it as a thing that could have existed, you're like, that would have killed people. You could die from a cut, so, you know. But while these medieval anti-sex toys may have been mythological, efforts to police a person's ability to get sexual are very real, and actually much more recent. So here's the thing. Men in the Victorian era in the early 20th century ran the risk of actually having their genitals squeezed into armored funnels and spiked cages

like these. But these real world devices were not intended to stop penetrative sex. They were all about burping the worm, badgering the witness, paddling the pink canoe, masturbation. and this is the the jungle penis as we have previously discussed here we are again

I'm very familiar with this one yeah yeah so the way this would work is that the idea is that you would wear it like I said there is a picture that I found after making a slideshow luckily for everyone here of a hot dog inserted into the middle ring very disturbing but the idea is that you would wear

it to sleep and if you became aroused in the night the expansion would then cause the spikes to close in. So you would wake up for that reason, probably. And the U.S. Patent Office alone actually had dozens of anti-masturbation devices on the books in the 1800s and 1900s. We don't know how many of them were actually made, and almost certainly not all of them were,

if you've ever looked at old-timey patents, a lot of them were just people being silly. So this is the drug on penis, like I said. There were also patents for electrified cages. There were patents for systems that pumped cold water into your pants, which I don't think ever actually existed, but really delights me. And so, yeah, we don't know how many of these things were made. Obviously, this one was, because there it is. But we know that physicians were widely peddling.

these anti-masturbation devices, anti-masturbation rhetoric. And it's likely that most people would have used simpler methods, like tying their children up before they went to sleep. That was very common. But here's the thing,

is that there was this belief in the 18th and 19th century that oninism, which is the kind of Christian scary name for masturbation, would cause horrible diseases. I could give a lot of lot of examples, but a big one is that in 1758, there was this guy, Samuel August to Saut,

who wrote something about how semen was an essential oil, which I just love, given the multi-level marketing scheme meaning of that phrase today, and that if you got rid of too much of it, it would lead to all kinds of health defects. And he was not alone. And so, yes, this is a list of various conditions that were said to be caused by excessive masturbation, loss of appetite, increased appetite, paralysis, impotence, loss of libido, weakness, vision and hearing loss, coughing, back pain, cognitive decline, rage, fever, insanity, organ failure, memory problems, gout, rheumatism, headaches, blood and urine, neuralgia, liver and kidney disease, urinary problems, uterine cancer, epilepsy, suicide, and most importantly, looking like this guy.

I just have to know, I think kind of looks like Benedict Cumberbatch, though to be fair on a very bad day. I love that loss of libido is on there. Yeah. Because like, I mean, you're going to use it all up. Yeah, isn't that's a thought. By my book. I have a lot to say. But so yeah, I love this man.

This is the one image that's in my book. It is the one visual gag I have. But we can't talk about masturbation without talking about corn flakes and graham crackers. So that's where we're going to circle back to. Neither food was explicitly invented to stop people from jerking off, but both of them were born out of this health movement. That was ultimately kind of about purity and often about not jerking off. So here's Sylvester Graham.

Graham crackers came courtesy of this 19th century Presbyterian man. He really liked vegetarianism. He popularized that in America. He wasn't in it to save the animals. He basically believed that like a plain plant-based diet was the most like the closest thing to the way people had lived in biblical times. And that if you wanted to adhere to God's plan, that's how you should eat. Did he this guy read the Bible? No, probably not.

Selectively, perhaps. And he also decided that like women should be at home. A big surprise. He kind of he built this whole lifestyle that really required you to have women living at home, spending all of their day, like preparing food and like milling grain. He was like, you should eat almost entirely grain. It should all be grown and milled yourself. So it was creating this paradigm where people had to spend all their own time, creating their own food, which in this day and age does sound kind of nice, like, you know, homesteading, hashtag homesteading, cottage core, whatever. But he was very much like, don't go make money by working thanks to the Industrial Revolution.

Have your woman at home turning butter and making grain. And like his followers did have pretty good health probably because this was the era when regulations were really non-existent. And a lot of food that people in cities were eating was really awful for them. and a lot of people were living in tenements and working horrible factory jobs, etc. So people who did, like, go live on farms, spending all of their time producing grains

and, like, sleeping on hard beds to discourage masturbation and lascivious thoughts did pretty well. So his movement was very popular. And he kind of, gram crackers were his, like, allowance of the letter of the law. He was like, okay,

like, if we want this movement to take off, we have to create some options for people, who don't want to literally homestead. And so graham crackers were like, we have this very plain, wholesome, grainy food that you can buy, like you shouldn't. It would be better if you spent all of your time growing wheat. But you can eat a graham cracker if you really must.

And I think that if you saw Teddy Grams, he would faint, vomit, shit himself. I don't know. He would be really upset. It's really definitely not what he intended. Samores would have killed him. And then there's this man, John Harvey Kellogg, he had really similar goals and strategies and lived at a similar time.

He was a Seventh-day Adventist, actually, and the founders of that church, they were already preaching, wholesome living, plain food, like don't have dangerous, sexy thoughts, et cetera. And so they actually sent Kellogg to medical school to help them kind of like figure out what their lifestyle was going to be. What was the goop of Seventh-day Adventism

is basically what Harvey Kellogg's job was going to be? And here's the thing, is that he was really focused on one particular way of stopping masturbation, and that was making people poop better. Believe it or not, John Harvey Kellogg believed that the pressure of a full bowel

could drive someone to sexual distraction. He thought that not pooping enough and having that pressure on your insides is what made you need to masturbate. I can't speak for everyone watching, but I just have to say needing to poop is not what gets me going. I mean, speak for yourself.

Yeah, I mean, fair. Like, whatever works for you is fine that is the point of my book. But I'm just saying that like, I mean, I disagree that pooping is hot, but I do think that like, I mean, it's like pressing up against the prostate gland. Yeah. That's where my head was too. Yeah.

Like he basically had, he was like, he had discovered his own G spot. Yeah. This dude had to poop. He was like super horny. And he was just like, oh God. Yeah, exactly. So he, in addition to creating a very high fiber cereal, that's how we know Kellogg today.

He also opened the sanitarium, and he did things like have people exercise in diapers outside for bracing effect. I just like this. This is a mechanical horse that a man is on in a diaper for some reason, exercising. This is a slapping machine. I don't know what it was for, but it existed. you could get that, all that at the Battle Creek seditarium run by the Kellogg's.

And this, these are chairs that vibrate to make you poop so that you don't need to masturbate. Just shake the poop out of you. So actually there was then Kellogg and his brother, they developed cornflakes together. Again, as a cereal, I feel like it's said a lot that like, oh, they made these plain food so you wouldn't get like spicy and excited. No, it was literally like you need to poop more so you won't be horny. And then his brother was like, we need to add sugar to this or no one will buy it. And that actually caused a schism. The brothers like stop speaking to each other because one of them was like the selling point of this cereal is that it makes you poop so much that you'll never masturbate again.

And the other one was like, let's frost these flakes. So what I love about this is that both these men had really puritanical aims, and these are the foods that they helped invent. And again, here's what you'll look like if you masturbate too much. The last page of my notes just says, masturbating is fine. I won't get into why. You'll have to buy my book to find out why masturbating is okay.

Or you can just believe me. You can eat frosted flakes and still masturbate, as I think many Americans have proven over the years. And that's my whole fact. Yay. All right. And that, I think, is it, except that we need to decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week was. So if the crowd present could clap, raise their hands, whatever, we will go through. figured this out.

Was the weirdest thing we learned this week that there are guard geese a foot? I feel very validated by Ryan smiling at me about the guard geese. I was just so happy to look at pictures of geese for 10 minutes. You're so welcome, friend. Was it Ryan's story about garbage birds? Was it me talking about teddy grams? Wow, thank you. Buy my book, please.

I beg of you. Was it the sex raft? Okay, yeah, that was my hair, too. The Sex Rock wins it. Yay, for Sex Roth. Thank you, everyone so much for joining us. We will be back soon with an actual live show. As soon as it's safe to do so, you're the best.

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