The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Hungriest Boy, Eyeglasses for Cannibal Chickens, Champion Guppy Gulpers

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

In the second half of our live show on June 14th, the weirdest things we learned this week range from the hungriest boy who ever lived to swallowing live goldfish for sport. 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 Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy 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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Popside.com slash weird. We encourage you to play along as long as you are allowed to drink, according to the law, wherever you are, and that where you are is not behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. We may also mention visual aids, and we promise we'll link to anything relevant or just especially hilarious on Popside.com slash weird, but we made a lot of Photoshop jokes, so like, it's not all going to be in there. Sorry, you should just come to the next live show. Just one more thing before we get into it, I'm sad to say that after this, there will be just one more episode of the weirdest thing I learned this week for this season. Sorry, that was very mean. Don't worry, we will be back in the fall, recharge, rested, and ready to serve you the weirdest facts yet. In the

meantime, keep leaving us those gorgeous five-star reviews on Apple, which we appreciate so much and which help other weirdos find the show. You can also send us voice messages on the anchor app or the anchor website. And we will definitely be doing another season break bonus episode featuring some of your favorite weird facts. Send via voice message. So please send to them. Also, feel free to get in touch on Twitter at Weirdest underscore thing or via voice message if you have ideas for a bonus episode. You might remember in the break between season one and season two, we compiled a bunch of data about what had gone on in weirdest thing and whether weird body horror stories or weird animal stories we're more likely to win, et cetera. If you like that, let us know and we can totally do it again.

Or if there's some other breaking format weirdest thing show you think would be awesome, give us a shout and we will give you credit when we do it and it's great. Okay, so like I said, we will be back next week with one more show. But for now, sit back and enjoy part two of our latest evening at caveat. 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 share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week.

I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Corinna Iosio. I'm just Bodie. Thank you. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by offering up some kind of little tease about some kind of fact or story we found. in the course of reading, writing, reporting, being fascinating people. And then we decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then once we all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene, and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Jess, would you like to start with your teas? Oh, I would. There's this really weird thing where in the early 20th century, you could buy eyeglasses for your chicken from the Sears catalog, but they were not to improve your chicken's visual acuity. That's all I will say.

Shocking, right? I would have thought they were reading glasses for the chicken. Right. One would think. One would think. Corinne, how about your tease? My tease is that there was once a time where there was an organization called the Intercollegiate Guppy Swallowing Association.

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Totally normal. Great. Somebody in the audience just said, hard pass. Yeah, audibly appalled, I would say. My cheese is that I have the story of a man who literally couldn't stop eating and the story of how it drove him to do unspeakable things. And as great as that reaction was, Jess, something just tells me that we need to

start with your fact. That's interesting. Not like we had a slideshow plan. Yeah, exactly. So, chicken eyeglasses. First, I want to thank my friend Claire Gilman, who just mentioned chicken eyeglasses in casual conversation and sent me down this crazy rat hole. This is why this show works is because we're these people

who have these conversations. Exactly, exactly. So, okay, first we're going to travel back to 19th century Great Britain. It is 1842, and Queen Victoria is obsessed with chickens. British explorers that year returned to her with seven Cochin China Fowl,

also sometimes known as Shanghai Chickens. that's these and I also want to say that wow yes they're very fluffy I love that the

ones on the left the description is buff Cochins which which refers to the color thick but they also just like look ripped

but they were obviously so big and beautiful she was very obsessed with them she built them this giant decked out aviary she would sit in there and like drink her tea like a great British royal

Well, and to interrupt briefly because on the weirdest thing, we always have to talk about how zany the Victorian era was. Of course. For people who don't know, Queen Victoria was like the pop star of her day and anything she was into, because she was like a young queen. She was unmarried when she took the throne. Right. So anything she was into swept not just the nation, but the continent. She invented white wedding dresses because she just liked the color white. She thought she looked good in it.

Because her husband was Austrian? Yes. She brought Christmas trees out of the Austrian, German world. Just like anything she was into, people loved. So chicken. It's funny you should mention that, Rachel. Really? Because she loved chickens so much that she bred these cochin's in her aviary,

and she sent the eggs to all of her royal friends and family. And then they had chickens. They were like, oh, my God, we love chickens. And then the general public was like, yo, Queen Victoria loves chickens. We love chickens. So it swept not only Europe and Britain, of course, but also into the Americas. Soon, you know, now that everybody knew about chickens, everybody was infected with hen fever. This was a real term.

It's not a deadly disease, but it just means that you like really love chickens. It was like any other- Like really, really-lachians? Like really, really-lucked chickens. I would love to see this version of reaffir madness. Yes. Yes. And fever.

And soon enough, Americans did also have. Hent fever, and that kicked off in 1849, when the first poultry show came to Boston. 10,000 people attended to see all of the chicken breeds. And this is really when hen fever became truly pandemic. And before all of this, farmers were really not into chickens, and they pretty much thought they were lowly and useless, and they didn't even record them as property in their farm inventory. But according to a National Geographic Story on this craze,

written by a writer named Emmeline Rood, who was basically a chicken historian, she's written an entire book on this. She says, poultry fanatics found themselves spending $1 on a single egg or up to $120 on a pair of fowls. And that's the equivalent today of $30 per egg and $3,600 for a pair of birds, which seems unfathomable to me personally. And I already spend a lot of money buying eggs in New York. And as those shows continued, there's still a thing in North Oxford, Massachusetts. These quote-unquote hen men. which sounds like a terrible subreddit that I don't ever want to read.

I'm going to leave that one blue. So these hen men started breeding their own chicken lineages, and one of these is the Brahma hen, which is that chicken that was like that big chicken meme a few years ago, where this hen like steps out of the coop, and nobody thought it was real. They were like, this is a man in a suit. This is not real.

But it's a real chicken. Bread from hen fever. they were two and a half feet tall. Whatath man wrought? I mean, he's like walking upright. It's pretty scary. And I've read that if you were to like pluck and cook the chicken, it would feed a family of four.

For how long? So anyway, you know, as chickens became more of a thing in the U.S., their eggs became cheap and available, we started eating them more. And an editorial in the New York Times in 1854 called them a great quote-unquote thinking food and that they were just a great practical excellent outcome of hen fever. And for that reason, when it comes to hen fever, the editorialist for the time said the country should let it rage. And boy, did we. Today there are a handful of breeds people use

for farming with regard to chickens. Most grocery store eggs come from leghorn chickens. How do I laser point? Leghorn chickens. And the road-horn chickens. And the road-dhound. Island Red. Oh. So, along the way, farmers and chicken enthusiasts kept having this weird issue in their coups, though, and that issue was cannibalism. That's right. Yeah, that's fucking terrifying.

That's right. Yeah, right? It's like staring through my soul. I would not like that. I don't like it, and I'm a giant human. It's a bigger effect when it's on this large screen. How long is this slide going to be up? For a long time, Corin.

and we're going to come back to it later. So yes, chickens are bloodthirsty, cute. They become enraged at the side of wood, and then they just peck and peck and peck until their chicken associate is a lifeless bloody pulp of its former self. And, okay, so this does make sense evolutionarily. Hens in the wild when they were to hunt lizards, or, insects or that kind of thing, they would know, okay, like that thing's injured, go after it,

or, you know, I pecked this thing, it is bleeding, I'm going to continue to peck it until it dies so I can eat it. And that makes sense. But obviously that it causes some trouble in domesticated coops, especially because chickens do peck each other to establish the pecking order, which is like the order of dominance. And sometimes that turns bloody, and then things get out of hand. And while we're on the topic of chicken blood, I can't not bring up circus geeks. Wow, we got some geeking fans out there. Love to see it. So a geek show in a circus was an act where a person,

usually it was like an opening act, where a person in a ring would chase around a few chickens, and then when that person caught a chicken, they would hold it and then bite its head off with their teeth and then eat the head. Which, you know, good, clean American fun. If it's good enough for Ozzy. True.

True. And it also inspired one of my favorite onion headlines, which is pregnant circus geek, now biting heads off chicken for two. Oh, we love it. We love it. Anyway, back to cannibal chickens. It's obviously a problem,

and it does usually happen when hens are unhappy. So their temperature is too hot or cold, their diet is deficient in some way or they don't have enough space, all concerning things that would stress you out. And farmers were concerned. There was unrest in the coop. They were losing chickens, just a bad time all around.

And instead of improving their animal's living conditions, they turn to eyeglasses. So prepare yourselves for this slide. So these were patented in 1903. So this first one on the left was just, that was the first patent. and it was meant to just protect, rather, the eyes from another chicken pecking.

But the later iterations, so there was also ones that were like blinders on a hinge. So standing up, the chicken couldn't see forward, and the idea is there that the chicken needs to see to have a target and peck and to see the blood. But then when they would bend down to eat their grain, they would like lift up so they could look down, but not straight ahead.

It's so elaborate. It is so elaborate. It is hysterical to me. And so then these rose, colored ones. And earlier when Jason was looking at my slides, he said the one on the top right looked like Bono. I can totally see it. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. So these rose-colored ones are meant to just make everything look red so that the chickens

can't see the blood. It just disguises the color of blood. So they did work, apparently. But you also have to like affix them. So you can see on the bottom right, there's like a little pin. So the way that you affix them, sometimes you just hook them in the nostril of the beak. Other times you would like essentially pierce the septum of the chicken. Yeah, it's not super chill. And in the 90s, one inventor made rose-colored contact lenses for chickens. He was a little bit weird, if you couldn't tell. He kept a jar of all of his failed lenses on his desk, and there were hundreds of them,

and one of his employees that they looked like jelly beans, which is really weird. And they didn't catch on one because, like, nobody wants to put a contact. lens in a chicken's eye. And also the chickens like went blind. They were clearly uncomfortable. They would like peck the air. It was just not a good situation. Today people just use a red light bulb in the coop.

Because of course, because duh. And the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences also suggests feeding chickens a handful of fresh greens every day, like weeds or clover grass because more fiber will keep their hizzards full, making them more content and less wily. That's true for me as well. Yes, yes. And it also helps to get out their energy in a large, enclosed chicken run that helps

lower their stress. So that's my chicken fact. I love chickens. I think I have hen fever now. And let it rage. Okay, we're going to take a very quick break because I let chickens go over because I have hen fever too. So we're going to take a quick break and the music should start

and then we're going to be right back with some more facts. And we're back and Corinne. Look at that arrows, great. Speaking of geeking, I think you have something about people swallowing some guppies. Yeah, it's kind of a situation. So I'm going to start with a story that happened in April 2016. A 28-year-old fellow checked himself into the ER

at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam. And what he told the doctors was that he was having having a lot of trouble swallowing and his throat just generally felt swollen and it will become relevant later that he was also drunk and like high the fuck off his ass. A medical term. Yes. So the E&Ts examined him and they discovered that this young gentleman had been catfished. And I mean that quite literally.

They snaked an endoscope through his nose and they discovered as the case study authors wrote in their paper, quote, a fish-like structure. I wonder what that could be. I have no idea. It's so strange. So they gave him a CT scan, and behold, there was a approximately three-inch obstruction right near the guy's larynx, and it had some protuberances as if to be fins. It was this guy. I'm sorry.

I know. It's a pet catfish scooped at the prime of his life straight out of an aquarium. And when presented with this information, our drunk and high friend managed to jog his memory and figure out how the f*** this thing got in his throat. He and his friends were having a good time. Apparently, this is something they would do often and one by one going around the room and scooping goldfish out of their aquarium, swallowing the goldfish hole and then going on to the next guy and the little slippery suckers just go right down. Eventually all... Suckery sucker.

Eventually, all that is left is this catfish, who is the largest one of the group. And what happened was one friend tried to swallow the catfish, and it jumped back out and started flopping around on the coffee table. But our hero, not to be outdone,

takes a slug of beer, picks up the fish, throws it back, fish is gone. He then starts to cough. He then takes some more beer. He's acting. as if this fish has perhaps gone down the wrong pipe because apparently there's a right pipe

for a live fish to go down. There's retching and vomiting, there's beer, there's blood, and again, for some reason, they don't go to the hospital right away and they leave enough time that he is completely forgotten that this incident has happened. So the reason that this was particularly terrible is a defense mechanism that a catfish has.

When you stress a catfish out by, you know, I don't know, shoving it into your mouth when it's still alive. There are these spines in its dorsals and its flippers that go rigid. In the wild, this is a defense mechanism. It's like, yo, predator, get off. Please back the hell away from me. But if you're just a drunken idiot, it has the effect of lodging the fish deep inside your throat.

No thank you. Yes. One of the doctors commented that the CoriDaris Anaeus, which is the scientific name for the common domestic aquarium catfish is quote, not a good choice for a drinking game. So I ask, naturally, well, what exactly is a good choice for a drinking game? Maybe. True.

I think so. Different kind of goldfish, though, but one of the study authors did tell live science that perhaps goldfish would be a little bit slipperier and might have been a better plan, as if that was still... It's just... It seems like the wrong situation to be like, kids, if you're going to do it, right? Do it in the house and with a goldfish. But unfortunately, the notion of swallowing goldfish is something that the internet already knows quite well.

There is something called the goldfish challenge. That is exactly what it sounds like. Swallow a live goldfish, record it on video, and post it on YouTube to impress your friends or something. Most popularly in recent memory is our very. own darling lovely stevo who gulped two guppies in live video only to vomit them back up still alive very shortly thereafter they lived right the thing about it is is that people have been doing this particular breed of nonsense for over 80 years i introduced to you lorthrop withington junior that's the name of a man who swallows

fish if ever I heard one. In 1939, our friend Lorthrop was a freshman at Harvard University. Yeah, that tracks. Yeah, right? This is an image from a story in Life magazine. Seems what happened was Lorthorpe had been bragging to his buddies, as college boys tend to do, that he had once swallowed a goldfish after seeing someone do it while he was on vacation.

And his friends said, cool, I will give you $10. He gave him $10. he swallowed the fish but it's kind of hard to figure out where exactly our friend Lorthrop saw this initially there are some reports about people in the 1920s watching bartenders do this just as kind of like a stunt to try to push drinks

there's one guy in Chicago who used to do a hand fake and switch the fish with a carrot because similar color and then do the chewing thing and then the stupid patrons would also then try to swallow the fish but that's as early as we can go people intentionally swallowing fish for sport. Before that, we know, though, that people did this by accident quite a bit.

There is a paper published, a literature review from 2017 from the Cleveland Clinic. And they found that fishermen and other people accidentally ingest live fish at a semi-alarming rate. They found 75 individual case studies. Things like there was a priest swimming, taking a little dip in a lake, and he opened his mouth, and in went a fish. Apparently... An act of God. Right? A reverse Jonah, if you will.

There are fishermen who apparently need free hands, so they decide the best place to hold a live fish is in their lips. And the fish wiggles and slides in. And there's also one story of a fisherman who was so pleased with his first catch that he gave it a celebratory kiss. And apparently his mouth was open. And in went the fish. If you're going to kiss a fish, like, don't front it. Just like a little, just m-a-a-l-l-ch. That's all he deserves, yes.

But unfortunately, these are all good explanations. There is absolutely no explanation for Lorthrup or what happened after he became famous for swallowing this fish. It started a collegiate guppy swallowing frenzy. It's like the Tidepod challenge, but with living things. It was just a really great idea. So this swept around very, very quickly, and it became very competitive. It was sort of everybody trying to one up each other, swallow more fish than the previous person. Like a one fish, two fish, what in the actual fuck is wrong with you, fish?

There was someone at Penn State swallowed 23 in one sitting. Someone at MIT swallowed 42. And we know this because this was governed by the rules of the intercollegiate guppy swallowing association. And there were rules. The fish had to be at least three inches long, and you had to keep them in your stomach for at least 12 hours. There is no vomiting. And, you know, breaking some ceilings.

This is Marie Hanson. She was the first woman to compete. The only fish swallower I respect. Good for her. Look how happy she is. She's so happy. She was a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The highest count that I've been able to corroborate

is from Clark University, someone down 98 fish. one go. And I was horrified because I just was appalled and just very curious and worried. Like, there are no reports of people getting really sick. I did find one story, though, that cited a doctor at UCLA who said that he did the math and the adult male stomach can safely hold approximately 150 live goldfish. The human body is incredible. But that the fad fortunately only lasted for the 1939 year. It still happens today, like we said, the aforementioned goldfish challenge. It's a common hazing ritual on college campuses. There's a big St. Patrick's Day party at Kobe College in Maine where people swallow live goldfish. It can also get you arrested.

And on PETA's bad list, they've obviously come out against this. There's a kid, this guy, swallowed two goldfish was then fined 200 pounds in ban from owning animals for a year. and our friend with his headline in The Sun had been one of Margaret Thatcher's pallbearers won two fish at a county fair and promptly drank them What a connection. A scandal.

It's completely absurd. So as if the fear of the law wasn't enough or bacteria or tapeworms, you know, I just, if I need to continue to deter people I'm going to because this is now my life's quest. I mean, people are not in. significant number of people go to the ER with live eels in their butts. Yes, this is also a true statement.

I'm not surprised that people continue to swallow live goldfish. But I just want to sit here and take this last minute to implore everyone to just think about the fish. I have so many questions. What happens to a fish when you swallow it live? If I have a stomach full of water, did I just make like a really dark, strange fish bowl that he's going to hang out in? If I had a couple margaritas, does it turn into cevice?

What exactly is going on? And so the Cleveland Clinic paper helped me figure out some of this. First of all, the fleshy parts of the fish break down very quickly in the human body. So if you're one of the unfortunates who has tried this and gotten something stuck, it will probably wear itself out, not physically, but just your body will break it down rather quickly. and you'll be able to pass it or somebody can reach in and yank it back out. But if the fish does make it into the digestive tract alive,

it's not terribly pleasant. As we swallow things, there's a peristalysis through our throat that's kind of squeezing him, so he's getting this weird little, like, massagy hug thing on the way down, makes it to the stomach. Cool, stomach full of water. Great, safe zone. No. 98.6 degrees is a little bit warm for a goldfish.

You're not going to cook it. But what's going to happen is water at that temperature doesn't dissolve oxygen very well. So the fish can't breathe. And then there's the stomach acid, which obviously is gross. But the biggest problem is our digestive enzyme pepsin, which has the sole job of breaking down proteins and what is fish made of.

It's an excellent source of protein in omega-3s. So while this fish is down there alive... Sorry, were you making the case for not swallowing live goldfish? No. Yes. Don't swallow the live goldfish. There are pills for that. So he's down there and he's like,

cool, I'm still in the water, I'm alive. But there's not enough oxygen in this water and every time he tries and struggles to breathe, he's actually sucking in poison that is just going to kill him faster. It's really sad. I found one biologist who gave an estimate to a publication called The Independent.

He said at max a fish can probably survive for five minutes in this environment, which is how Steevos came back out, still flopping and loving and loving. And being like, you dude, I win. If you have a stomach full of alcohol, however, as we all know, it can actually have an anesthetic effect.

It will chill the fish. He'll just kind of pass out and, you know, go on his own bleak, dark, internal end. But he won't be feeling... He won't be feeling, fortunately, any pain. So if you're going to do it, I guess the beer is, probably the best plan, but I'm just going to really ask everyone to not swallow their pets. Reasonable. A hot take.

Yes. The hottest take. A bold stand on goldfish swallowing. Thank you. And we're going to take a very quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. That happened fast. So it's time for one more fact. It's time for my fact.

And I promised the story of a man who literally couldn't stop eating. just a very hungry boy, and how it drove him to do unspeakable things. So. Oh my God, Rachel, there weren't slides when we were practicing this yesterday. Hold on to your butts. So, Hunker, we all experience it. In 1772, a man now referred to only as Terrar. That's how the internet told me it's pronounced, but I don't speak French, so if I'm wrong,

fuck you. I tried. He was born in rural France. We don't know if that was his real name or just a nickname. This is how he is referred to in all the literature we have. He was reportedly pretty average, except for one thing, his appetite. Tarar was a hungry boy. He could eat a quarter of a cow at the time he was a teenager,

even though he himself weighed only 100 pounds or so. And if you're like, why not a whole cow? Like, a cow is a lot. And allegedly, you know, a lot of this is hard to verify. but according to scholars who were writing about him in the 1700s, his family kicked him out because they couldn't feed him. They were like, you are literally eating us out of house and home. You've eaten the cows.

You've eaten the house. Please leave. And so he set off to make his own fortune and find his own food. He kind of got in with a bunch of near-do-wells. He was a Parisian street performer. And he made a pretty decent living, eating gross amounts of stuff and also just plain gross stuff like corks, rocks, he could find, anything he could swallow that would impress people and make them throw money at him.

And that went pretty smoothly, except for a few instances of bowel obstruction, which he ended up in the hospital for. But life was just kind of rolling on for Terrar through his teen years as a showman. And let's pause to emphasize that Tarar, despite eating everything, he could find, was not overweight. Reports say he was actually pretty waifish. They say he had very pale skin and very fine light hair. And in fact, the only unusual thing about him was that he had an abnormally wide mouth in which his teeth were heavily stained

and on which the lips were almost invisible, to which I say, like the babadook, except blonde and French. So now that we have that visual, apparently his body also had lots of sagging excess skin to accommodate his gaping maw and also his post-meal belly distension. So he was a very thin, not unusually thin,

just like a normal-sized guy, even though he was eating what sounds like probably tens of thousands of calories a day, and he was not Michael Phelps. Man was not swimming laps to burn that off. So, okay, you have an image of him in your head and on the screen. This is staying on for a while, by the way.

I don't have a lot of imagery for Tarar, so. And I spent an important. embarrassing amount of time putting this beret on the babadook. Omelais du frommage. On the outbreak of the war of the first coalition, Terrar joined the French Revolutionary Army because I guess he wasn't getting enough to eat as a street performer. But military rations could not satisfy him,

even though he apparently became very conscientious and did a bunch of chores for the other men in the army so that they would give him some of their rations. He was still like eating scraps, and he actually ended up in the military hospital with malnutrition and exhaustion. Eating even more than the average man, he was acting as if he was being starved to death.

And in the hospital, he was given quadruple rations, but he was still found scavenging for garbage. And then they even found him in the infirmary taking the herbal poultices, like the smashed up herbs and medicinal plants that were placed on people's wounds, and he was just eating them. He got more desperate later.

let me tell you what. It gets dark. There's one... Wait, it's not dark yet? No. Oh, okay. So there's one anecdote in the medical literature about a time when his doctors...

They had been like restraining him. You know, they were trying to keep him on this restricted quadruple diet. And he just was always escaping and trying to eat more food. And so they decided once that there was this meal set out for like 15 laborers who were supposed to be eating

at the end of a day of... hard physical labor. And they decided they just weren't going to restrain him. And he ate it all. It was a two giant meat pies meant for 15 men, four gallons of milk, and several large dishes of grease and salt. Which in 18th century, France, I guess, was, you know, a condiment.

It's what I had for lunch. Like eating a bowl of ketchup. And then he just fell asleep. He was pretty content until he woke up and was hungry again. According to one doctor's report, he was known to swallow a live eel once. He probably could have eaten many hundreds of goldfish. So many hundreds. So many goldfish.

There is one report, and I don't know how true this is, because like 18th century doctors, I can't ask them. But he allegedly once was handed a live cat while hungry, tore it open, drank its blood, ate its guts. Would make a good circus geek. Yes. He would have been a fantastic... I mean, that's basically what he was doing as a street performer. He was the original geek, I would say.

And according to the doctor, he then, like, puked up just the bones and the fur, like an owl. Which sounds absurd to me, but on the other hand, I've never watched a human eat a whole life cat. So, like, maybe that is what we would do if we ate a whole life cat.

I don't know. So dubious, sure. But what's more dubious is that doctors were all, like, other than his appetite, he's really of sound mind. He's a perfectly normal man, except for all of this eating a cat. He was never put in an asylum.

They were just like, yeah, it's a real shame that this totally normal guy just keeps eating live cats in front of us, which just says a lot, I guess, about the 18th century in France. And in fact, he was made a spy by the army, very briefly. He was not very good at it. So some combination of him having this idea, and people in the army,

hearing about his talents, led to the suggestion that he could swallow military secrets and take them across lines. So he demonstrated that he could swallow a wooden box containing a letter and then, you know, reproduce it at a later time.

And a general who was apparently the only sane person involved in the story was like, can we trust this guy who eats live cats? to carry military secrets. So he gave him a dummy letter. It basically said, like, please confirm receipt of this pooped letter.

Thank you. Signed general. And that was very fortunate because the Prussian army actually captured him. He had been pretending to be a German peasant, and the one flaw in that plan was that he spoke no German. So it was like that scene from Inglorious Bastards.

He just stood no chance. And after a little bit of light, torture, he confessed. He did hold out for a while. He wanted to be a good spy. He wanted there to be a reason why God had given him this hunger, I imagine. But he eventually confessed and he was like, I have a serious

military secret because he thought he did. And then they held him over a latrine until he pooped the military secret, which turned out to be the dummy letter saying, please tell me whether or not this guy actually delivered this to you. And the Prussian army was very mad. And so

they staged a mock execution. It's not clear whether they actually intended to hang him and then changed their mind or if they just wanted to scare him. But in any case, he was not actually executed. He was beaten and sent home. And at that point, he started to beg for a cure. He was like, let's try anything. They tried tobacco pills.

They tried laudanum. At one point, they even were like, what if we just feed you so many hard-boiled eggs in the morning that you can't possibly be hungry for anything else? Because, like, that's a sustainable thing. We can just get you hundreds of eggs. And he was still hungry. there was no amount of eggs that could satisfy him,

even though they're a good thinking food. They're a great thinking food. So he was in the hospital for a while. You know, they're, like, constantly looking for a cure. He was, like, a permanent resident. And then there started to be rumors of him getting caught in the morgue, gnawing on things, going into where people were having bloodletting treatments

and just, like, taking a sip. and then a toddler went missing from the hospital. And I'm not saying that Tarar ate the toddler, but I will say that no one was willing to vouch for him not having eaten the toddler. And so he was turned out of the hospital. The doctors were all like, I won't take my reputation on you not eating a live child. So he went off to make his own fortune again.

And sadly, maybe not sadly if he was out eating children, I don't know. In his 20s, he got very sick. He had chronic diarrhea his whole life, which will shock you, I'm sure. He went back to one of the doctors who had treated him, and he actually said, I'm dying, I know I'm dying, and I think it's because of a gold fork I swallowed once that never came out, because I guess he had kept a really good record of the exit, of the non-food things he ate,

which is probably a good thing to do if you're, like, eating rocks and gold forks. So he was like, yeah, that one gold fork that got away in my intestine. I just have so many questions. Forks are very pointy. Yeah, well, you know what? He had to make a living as a showman. Also, yeah. The wooden box?

Like, do you think splinters were an issue? Oh, God. I did think about that. And I also had questions about the size of the wooden box. There was no information about that. I imagine it was a small wooden box with like a fold-it-up letter in it, like a carrier pigeon-sized note, I hope. Let us pray.

But the doctor was like, no, you're dying because you have tuberculosis. But he did really want to autopsy him. because, you know, what a fascinating man. What a character. And his corpse rotted really quickly when he died, and a lot of the surgeons were like, no, thank you. But this one doctor really wanted to know why Tarar was so different. So, and he also wanted to find that gold fork.

So at the autopsy, they found a few things. They found that his gullet was abnormally wide. They said that when they opened his jaw, they could see straight down a broad canal into the stomach. which is just like, I mean, I don't think that's why he was so hungry. That's just a consequence of having swallowed things. He did his stretches. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, he had limbered up his gullet. His stomach was enormous. It took up almost his whole abdominal cavity, covered in ulcers. He also had, he was not in a good way. His liver and gallbladder were very large. He had all of the internal symptoms you would expect of someone who had eaten non-food in huge quantities and humans possibly, dead humans live. toddler demons, whatever was around.

They didn't come to any conclusions other than like, yeah, he had a weird body, he had some stuff going on. Weirdly, weirdly, there was another guy, Charles Dommerie, who was a contemporary. He was alive literally at the same time, and he was a Polish soldier who spawned similar tales or all these stories about how he just couldn't stop eating, and people would do weird experiments where they would just give him a bunch of non-food, and he would just be like, yeah.

fucking hungry, I'll eat these candles. And the really cool thing about Charles is that he jumped ship from the Prussian army to the French army because he thought they would have more food there. He probably lived a pretty tragic life as well. There's less known about him. I hope that they were friends.

I hope they got to talk about their hardship, their shared hardship. So the question is like, what's going on? Okay, so we know there are conditions where people tend to overeat. There are genetic conditions where people start to have a really intense hunger starting in childhood. But most of those people gain lots of weight. They gain the weight you would expect them to gain based on their caloric intake.

There are very rare conditions where people can't store body fat at all. So they have to eat constantly to provide energy to their body because they have no energy stores. But that's very different from the way these men look and acted because it is very obvious looking at those individuals that they have no body fat. And these guys just looked pretty normal. But one clue is that that both of them were said to sweat a lot and they were said to smell very bad, which is maybe because they were eating dead things all the time. But there's some evidence that they both had trouble sleeping and would like have night sweats. So they probably have some kind of hyperthyroidism, which lances help to overeating

and maybe having a metabolic rate that keeps that from making you gain weight in some cases. But we don't see anything to this extreme in modern literature at all. So of course it's possible that some of this was embellished. I mean, again, it was the 18th century. I can't ask. But there are a couple researchers who suggest that maybe they had injuries to their amygdala that could have changed both their metabolic rate and their patterns of eating and maybe combined with some kind of hyperthyroidism.

The fact that there were two of them in such close proximity is just so fascinating to me and we'll probably never know why. I mean, I suspect that maybe one of their cases was this extreme and the other was exaggerated because there were doctors talking about this guy's extreme case. It's probably not a coincidence that they were at the same time. There were probably doctors who were trying to one-up each other. But it's fascinating stuff. So one thing about Terrar is that he did live on in public consciousness.

He has a page on TV trope devoted to him. TV trope is where we talk about tropes in TV and movies. And there's a TV trope called horror hunger, which is when a character is just consumed by an overwhelming hunger that, you know, changes their personality. Like Ed Hardy and Venom. Tom Hardy, I'm sorry. Ed Hardy?

I always do that. That's different. That's totally different. He's clearly the superior Hardy. I'm really sorry to Tom Hardy that I did that. Ed Hardy's dumb. Tom Hardy is at least a very attractive man and really sold this role. He committed.

and it's not a very good movie, so kudos to him. Hungry boy. I heard that the scene was his idea, that he, like, improv this. He just, like, jumped into the lobster tank. I need to see this film. Yeah, so... I think we just got the highlight real.

That's the trope of horror hunger where you just can't help yourself, and Tarar is considered a prime example of that. He also is the subject of a weird opera with puppets. And really, that's all any of us can hope for. So, all right. to the hungriest boy whoever lived.

And those are our facts. So, Stan, would you come out and give us our applause a meter again? Thank you. Yeah, Stan. Hey, Stan. Can we get some applause for Stan for joining us for our

Tech Alvon segment? All right, so what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Was it the origin of rose-colored glasses? Was it that men swallow goldfish? Was it the hungriest boy who ever lived?

Stan, what's the verdict? I think it was close. Great, cool. Wow, I'm really glad I saved the best crown for myself. It plays noise. I'll play it for you. It won't stop. It won't stop now, so this is just my life.

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