The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - We Did it Joe (Pilates), They Did Surgery on a Cocaine Hippo, Steinbeck Digs Deep (Literally)

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Ben Lillie joins the show to talk about John Steinbeck doing very in-character things on a scientific expedition out on the open ocean. Plus, Sara Kiley talks about Joseph Pilates (yes, that Pilates), and Rachel explains why people are doing surgery on those cocaine hippos. 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! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud, ERP for any size business. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text 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 from the editors of Popular Science.

I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Ben, Lily. Ben, welcome to the show. Woo! Hello. Listeners can't see what's in Ben's background because we, are stauntly audio only, mostly because I record from my pantry.

But then is sitting in our favorite venue in the world, Caviot, because it's his. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. Hi. Yeah, I'm sitting here at Caviott in the lower side in New York City. I'm a recovering theoretical particle physicist who does theater and comedy. It's a common story. Yeah, I left physics in 2008, 09, started doing stuff, started performing with the moth and other places. classes at UCB, worked for TED for a while, did a bunch of stuff and then decided to do my own thing. So I started the Story Collider many years ago where people tell true stories about science in their life and then opened caveat, which is a venue. It does a lot of comedy and in particular

a lot of nerdy and particularly academic stuff. We have a lot of science shows, a lot of stuff like that. Yeah, it's an awesome spot. And it's funny. I was thinking about when you first announced your plans for caveat. Oh, yeah. I recall the vibe in the science media community being like very cool idea, sad that it will definitely not work because of live events being. And I remember being like, it is really cool. I hope it works.

And that was what, like a decade ago? Yeah. Yeah, we're coming up on our nine-year anniversary. Wait, people thought it wouldn't work because they thought live events don't work. I think it was just like, for people in media whose entire lives were on Twitter, I think the idea of running a venue sounded because it is hard to your credit. To be fair to them. The vast majority of venues close.

And in fact, I learned this after we started the process, the majority closed before they opened. Wow. They weren't. And yet. We did survive. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're thrilled to have you on and definitely going to start working on our next live show plan soon. But for now, let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, which we still do live because people can clap. vote, but we don't do that on the show anymore because it was always a three-way tie. Seriously, what's your tease? Yeah, so my tease is that today's trendiest workout got its start in a World War I internment camp. Oh, wow. Yeah. That fits with how I feel about a lot of trendy workouts.

You know what? And this is my favorite trendy workout, which like, so here we go. Great. Can't wait to hear more. Then, what's your tease? My tease is that a very famous person was involved in a project to drill all the way through the earth's crust, and it is a bizarre story. Love bizarre stories. My tease is that you've heard that there's more than one way to skin a cat, which, like, yikes, why do we say that?

But there's also more than one way to sterilize a hippo. Oh. Yeah. I think I'm going to dive right in. It's been a while since I went first. Now that I've said that, I'm like, maybe I've gone first on every episode I've recorded. recently, but who can remember? We've talked about the infamous cocaine hippos on weirdish thing a few times because

cocaine hippos are straight down the middle for us. Like, obviously, we're going to talk about the cocaine hippos. And they're back in the news because sadly, the Colombian government has made the decision to call many of them. And I want to dig into a little bit of that. But for those just tuning into the cocaine hippo discourse, you know, literally where have you been? But here is a primer.

So back in the 80s, notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar had a big menagerie of animals at his estate, Hacienda, Naples. Because really, what self-respecting drug lord in the 80s didn't have their own zoo full of illegally imported animals. Like, be friggin for real. Like, come on. So when Escobar was killed in 1993 and the government seized the estate from his family, there were hundreds, if not more than a thousand exotic animals present. Some of them sadly passed away. I'm sure it was a chaotic time in terms of, you know, zookeeping given the handover of all of his assets. Most of the remaining ones were donated to zoos around the world.

And actually, fun fact, that estate is now a massive amusement park with a zoo, but not with the same animals. Those animals were dispersed. But the hippos, which were descended from four that Escobar purchased in 1981, they were deemed too big to send abroad. And so they just kind of wandered off and started breeding. And they were not demure. No. Hippos eat loads of grass and they make tons of poop. And both of those things have a huge impact on the ecosystem. And that's, you know, ignoring the fact that they're also just so large, like them stomping around literally impacts the ecosystem. So they are definitely invasive. They're native to Africa.

You know, South America's not their home. And they're large and take up a lot of space in terms of both resources and physically. They're also not for nothing the most deadly large land animals on the planet. They always come up as the surprise never one, right? Well, because it's really, hippos are so funny in this way because sort of from a safe distance, they do seem really cute and kind of goofy. Yeah. You know, their faces are so. So round.

I think it's like, you know, the like kiki buba thing where it's like, you know, the sharp objects versus screeching objects. I think hippos are maybe the most booba deadly animal. They really, you know, they look like they're just kind of round and funny. But no, they have very sharp teeth and the incredibly strong jaws, like some of the strongest jaws in the world. And they're very territorial. So not only do they do things like spray poop all over the place, that's what they do,

to attract each other. That's not even when they're mad at you. That's friendly. Yeah. That's a friendly hippo. Yeah, they will absolutely mess you up, which again, it's funny because people who have never been in close proximity with a territorial hippo really find them quite endearing. But, you know, both can be true. So the point being, it was not really an option to just let these hippos do their thing because they were doing their thing quite effectively. One 2023 study estimated that at the time there were 91 hippos in the middle Magdalena River Basin, Columbia. And the hippo population was growing at almost 10% per year. Oh my God. There's a lot of hippos. And they estimated that by 2032, there would be 230 hippos.

And by 2050, there would be more than a thousand. So, yes. After years, of efforts to deal with the growing hippo issue in like a very humane fashion, gentle touch. The government is now going to euthanize around 80 of them, which is probably a bit less than half of the current population. But in reading about this, I saw that sterilization efforts were really earnest. They like really tried very hard for several years. But it's just so dangerous and expensive to sterilize a hippo that they really had no chance in retrospect.

And I thought like, wow, I want to know more about that. So we're going to talk about what it takes to sterilize a hippo. Basically, if you want to keep a hippo from making more hippos, you've got two options. I mean, three, if you count euthanization, but folks really did want to try to be very gentle with the cocaine hippos. They're beloved both for the tourism they draw in and just as kind of like a matter of principle and local pride. That being said, there are locals who are like, these hippos are a menace.

We need to get rid of them. But there's also some local sentiment that, you know, I think it's very tied up in the legacy of Pablo Escobar in Colombia, which is a very complex legacy more so than many of us outside of Colombia might assume. And it's the same with his cocaine hippos. And in fact, a large aggressive male was culled by environmental authorities in 2009. And there was such a national and international outcry that the court made it illegal to shoot hippos. even though scientists were like, no, that's a bad idea. We do need to get something about the hippos. In 2011, the government started a sterilization program aimed at performing castration surgeries.

But by 2019, just four males and two females had been sterilized. Why? Because this is how that works. A six to eight person team at minimum uses, according to one article, 180 pounds of carrots to lure a hippo into a correct. growl because they will not be, they won't, they won't even get out of bed for less than 160 pounds of carrots. Like, let's be real. Period.

And also keep in mind, hippos spend most of the day submerged in water to stay cool. They're really only active on land at night. So a lot of this corraling is happening in the dark and it's always happening in the mud. Then you need to shoot the hippo with darts packed with enough sedative to knock out around three horses. and those darts have to penetrate two inches of hippo skin. So some serious equipment, and if things don't exactly work out, then you've gotten angry hippo and you're in the dark.

So it's not great. So assuming it works and you knock the hippo out, then you've got to roll the hippo into place, which takes like a lot of pulleys and is super dangerous, even if the hippo is totally sedated, just because it's so large. I saw one video where they actually used like a big old lead pipe that they sort of like slid over the hippo's teeth, like put one tooth in one end and one tooth in the other,

because they had to hold the hippos mouth open for the breathing apparatus that made sure that she kept a breathing while under anesthesia. Yeah, and remember they have some of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom about 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. So like you really do need something to wedge that mama's mouth open. Oh, my God. If you want to give her, like, a little oxygen mask. And castration is a full-on internal operation for both males and females because, you know, for the female, they're going in for the ovaries. For the males, their testicles often are retracted and hiding under a bunch of that two-inch thick hip-hers skin. So it's invasive.

It's several hours of surgery. One article I read said it takes about five hours. and others actually estimated more. And again, again, this is happening in the mud. In the field. At night. In the mud at night. Perfect.

Perfect. Love that. Presumably with other hippos around. Yeah. Well, that's a great point. And I don't know how they deal with that part. I guess they sort of, they might sort of strategize finding a straggler. But the process costs tens of thousands of dollars for a single hippo.

Wow. And is dangerous and messy. And so what were they? going to do? Well, there was some hope in 2021. They started instead doing chemical castration, or in addition to as many of these surgeries as they could. There was this product called Gonacon, which is an animal contraceptive. It's used in various zoo and domesticated animals. And it works on both males and females. And the U.S. actually donated a bunch. The Department of Agriculture, donated some for use in Columbia.

But it's so pretty expensive. The dose for a hippo is about $7,000. Oh, my God. They're big. And while there's evidence in other animals that repeat doses of this drug can cause permanent infertility, which is what we're looking for if we're really trying to curb population growth, we're not actually positive that that's the case in hippos.

So their plan was to get three doses in, and they're like pretty sure that's pretty sure. that's probably going to cause, if not permanent, then pretty long-term infertility. But in 2023, a few years later, a study came out that was like, this actually isn't working. We really need to up our game. That was the study that estimated we were going to have a thousand of these hippos by,

it was at 2050. Good Lord. Yeah. And they were like, this is going to be really expensive. It's going to cost millions of dollars. And for every decade that we put off taking this seriously, the cost will more than double because, you know, it's not quite exponential growth, but like there are more and more hippos.

So it's really going to run away from you very fast. And this paper was basically arguing, we have wasted as much time as we can waste, trying to be as humane as possible with the hippos. We're so sorry, but like it might be time to get serious. And in response to that paper, still, the government really didn't want to euthanize these hippos. So they committed to a massive sterilization push. mostly using the chemical castration. But this year, the government concluded that those efforts aren't curbing the population fast enough.

Remember, you got to find the hippo, you got to hit it with your birth control dart, it's got to go through two inches of skin. And then you've got to do that a couple more times at some point in the future, all about trying not to get trampled or body slammed by a hippo. And it's not like these bloats of hippos, which is what you call a group of hippos. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, yeah. It's not like they're always in the same place and you're always going to find them. Like, they roll, they wander. And also remember, they will absolutely fuck you up.

You know, Mou Dang, these guys are not. She's a pygmy, by the way, which is still not exactly the cuddly critter you, like, want her to be, but they're much smaller, obviously, and slightly less aggressive, emphasis on slightly. So, like, it's a little less ridiculous to, you know, think Moudang might be your friend, but still, you know, respect her distance. But, yeah, the big boys are very territorial. They kill an estimated 500 people a year in Africa, where they're. They're, of course, native.

Now, in Columbia, where there are far fewer of them, there are no known fatalities tied to cooking hippos yet. But there are several incidents that make it clear. It's, like, only a matter of time. In 2021, this 33-year-old fisherman was attacked on the banks of a creek, and a hippo actually threw him, like, six and a half feet. He was in the hospital for a month, but fortunately lived. Also in 2021, a hippo attacked a farmer, and he had multiple broken bones.

Hippos have apparently taken to charging at people to play chicken. Like they want to scare them off. So they don't actually barrel into them, but they're like come pretty close. They've charged boats and knocked fishermen into the water, which is, of course, very dangerous. And they also wander. In 2023, one walked into the road and got hit by car, sadly. The driver was okay. The hippo and the car were very much not.

And recently one apparently started grazing by a school, which rightfully freaked people out. So, you know, all of this is to say if the news that Columbia is going to euthanize, you know, around half of these hippos upsets you, I totally get that. I understand why there's always outcry when they talk about this. But just as somebody who's been a passionate fan of the cocaine hippo for years, I really have to emphasize that they have pulled out all the stops in trying to avoid euthanizing any of these hippos. and it really is going to get totally out of control in a way that they will not be able to put that cat back in the bag if they don't do something pretty drastic now. Also, not for nothing.

Several years ago, they did say like, and also what zoos want hippos. And the thing is that as the Colombian government learned while trying to deal with Pablo Escobar's zoo back in 1993, an adult hippo is really, it's not conceivable to transport. that. I was talking to my husband Oliver and he was like, it makes one wonder

how zoos managed to have hippos and I was like I think by sharing baby hippos like I think the reason we have hippos in zoos. Yeah, exactly. So unsurprisingly, no one has stepped up to receive cocaine hippos because it would just be a

real to do to track them down, trap them, transport them and even then like there would be like a real limit on which ones it was even possible to take. All of this being said, obviously no one revels in news of hippo euthanasia. So I wanted to end with a palli cleanser about another more wholesome incident where humans had to figure out how to manipulate a hippo for their own good. Yeah. So remember Baby Fiona at the Cincinnati Zoo?

I actually didn't remember why we were all obsessed with Baby Fiona. I just was like, yeah, she was an adorable hippo. It turns out, I forgot. She was born six weeks premature in 2017. she weighed just 29 pounds, which is a big baby, but not for a hippo. A normal hippo newborn is 60 to 100 pounds. And she was too weak to stand up a nurse, which is what they normally do. They don't spring up ready to go, like most wild animals.

Her mom, like, sniffed her and pretty much laid down to take a nap. It was, like, very clear that, you know, in the wild, there would have been no chance for this baby. And her mom's instinct was to be like, that doesn't look like anything to me. which again is sad, but like, you know, it makes sense. Yeah. She probably only even survived long enough for zookeepers to like get a good look at her because while her mom labored for most of the birth in the water as it's typical, for some reason we don't know why she got out and finished on land.

Otherwise the baby would have like immediately drowned, which is do keepers think why no other zoo had had a pre-mi hippo situation? Because they asked around. They were like, does anybody know it? what to do with a preemie hippo and people like, absolutely not. I've never, never had that. So once it became clear that BB, the mom, was giving up, but that the baby was still alive a few minutes after birth,

the zookeepers rushed in. They had to figure out how to keep Fiona warm without drying out her delicate skin. They had to figure out how to feed her. So normally with a baby at a zoo that's either an orphan or, you know, their parent has, you know, for lack of a better word, kind of rejected them the way BB had. There's a company that creates and sells animal formulas first use.

But when they went looking for a hippo recipe in the database, there was only like a really basic entry from the 60s, I think, which is basically a baby hippo who died and they'd been like, okay, well, this hippo is lactating. So like, let's get some and take a sample. But they remembered that baby had been conditioned to submit to regular ultrasound appointments during her pregnancy. So they trained her to stand very patiently in this corral. this little stall while she got fed, and she was used to zookeepers like poking and prodding at her belly during this time to do ultrasounds. So they realized that that was actually a really good setup for milking a hippo,

which is something that, to their knowledge, no one had ever done before. It's not a good idea to try to milk a hippo. It's a bad idea. But in this particular instance, it had to be done. And they were like, there's a chance. So they went for it, and they actually successfully milked her twice a day like that. She was very chill about it because, again, it happened to, you know, be a very similar situation from her perspective to when she had been doing the ultrasounds. And they'd already trained her for that.

She basically was like, I'll stand here. They give me a snack. And it's fine. Now, it was not nearly enough milk to meet Fiona's galoric needs. But they were able to give her some of the benefits of that real breast milk early on. And they also got plenty to send off to analysis at the Smithsonian's National Zoo, which has the. the world's largest exotic milk repository. Oh, my God.

Also kind of sounds like something that Pablo Escobar would have as a house, but for different reasons. Yeah. But it's basically a big freezer full of animal milk that they can study and replicate as needed. And this was their, you know, their first hippo sample. They were very excited to look at it. And they were able to use that to help the Cincinnati Zoo figure out a formula. Apparently it's, they like kind of start with a rich cow milk-based formula and then go from there.

But that's, they only even knew to start with the rich cow-based formula after analyzing the milk, because different animal milks are so different. They were like, we don't know. And there's actually, there's a really great podcast episode, Smithsonian's Side Door podcast back in 2017, got into this. Definitely recommend checking it out. And yeah, this all turned out great. As of early 2025, Fiona weighed approximately 2,500 pounds. Yeah. So she's a, she's a baby.

She's a baby. But she's a, you know, she's grown up nice. She's a big girl. Healthy adult weight for her age. Though, apparently, she retains a smaller, narrower stature than average. So she's sometimes described as, she's described as chubby for his eyes. She's like a little short, a little small bone. Yeah, she's petite, but she's put on weight beautifully.

So that's our happy hippo story to wrap things up. And yeah, hippo's adorable. I was in Cincinnati once for work years ago, and I was there for like basically 24 hours, and I took a trip to the zoo just to stare at Fiona. I literally like walked to the hippo, looked at Fiona, and I was like, good. And then I left and went to the Charmin factory to learn about their fake poop. It was a great work trip. Yeah, absolutely.

But yeah, hippos, man. That's amazing. Anyway, so as somebody who's relatively new to the cocaine hippos mythos, are they called cocaine hippos just because of Escobar or do they actually do cocaine? Just because of just because of their papa, Pablo. No, yeah. Can you imagine? What a nightmare.

That would be bad. Listen, you thought cocaine, you thought cocaine bear was intense. Cocaine hippo actually way worse. Oh, man. Yeah. And then the way they decided. to call half of them? Did they just watch a bunch of Avengers movies?

And they're like, that's a good idea. That's a good standard. So I don't know for sure, but I, my assumption is that they talked to some of the researchers who put out that modeling paper being like, here's what's going to happen if we don't deal with the hippos. Because they, that paper did break down a bunch of sort of like, what are our best options going forward. And they were like, euthanasia to some extent is the most effective.

cost effective, ultimately humane way to go. And then they sort of broke down like, if you insist on keep doing the birth control stuff, like you're, you know, how that would work. So I think it probably is, you know, based on something. And I know that they're specifically with the sterilization, their main priority was getting young females because those are the ones who are going to, you know, have a calf every two years if they don't, don't stop them. So, yeah, my assumption would be.

be that they're probably going for the young reproductive females primarily. Because, you know, they're really okay with as many of these hippos as possible living out their hippo lives and hopefully not killing anybody. And to be fair, like people around here have had to got, have gotten used to the hippos being around. You know, I don't think it's, it's not quite as dangerous as if a hippo was suddenly dropped into, you know, a suburban neighborhood. no warning, but it is pretty dangerous. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. We'll keep you

all updated on the hippos, but, you know, pour one out. For those, those girls and boys. They had a good run. They really did. The government tried so hard not to kill these hippos, guys. I really cannot overstate that. That's a lot of effort. Yeah, yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more facts. your Alienware journey with the streamlined Alienware 15. They designed this machine to refine the essentials, creating a more focused gaming laptop for players who demand quality without the clutter. They designed a brilliant 15.3-inch 16.5 hertz display seamlessly into a portable 15-inch body. You get a larger, immersive window into your game that still travels easily wherever your mission takes you. Inside, an Intel

Core 7 processor drives high performance during every session. It delivers the speed and responsiveness you need to keep your game smooth and seamless. They wrapped all of this in our signature, durable alienware design to handle any journey and look good doing it. This is the alienware experience distilled into one iconic machine. Visit alienware.ca.ca.orgalianware 15 today. Start your Alienware Journey with the streamlined Alienware 15. They designed this machine to refine the essentials, creating a more focused gaming laptop for players who demand quality without the clutter. They designed a brilliant 15.3 inch 16.5 Hz display seamlessly into a portable 15-inch body.

You get a larger, immersive window into your game that still travels easily wherever your mission takes you. Inside, an Intel Core 7 processor drives high performance during every session. It delivers the speed and responsiveness you need to keep your game smooth and seamless. They wrapped all of this in our signature, durable alienware design to handle any journey and look good doing it. This is the Alienware experience distilled into one iconic machine. Visit Alienware.ca.

slash Alienware15 today. back. And Ben, who's, who's drilling into the earth? Tell me more. All right. All right. So this comes from, I'm doing a stage show about jargon. So for, for, I've been working maybe the last 15 years. I do a lot of consulting with academics through all the various things I do about how to talk to their work on stage. Right. And number one, no jargon. Right. That's, that's, that's, we all know this. That's the first thing you do, toss it out. I have my rules of jargon, which is, if it's jargon, it goes. Number two, if you're not sure if it's jargon, it is. Number three, if you're sure it's not jargon, it probably still is.

You're science writers, you understand this, right? But so over the years, I'm also like, some of it is really fucking cool. There's some great stuff. So I'm doing a whole show about it. It's, it's, there's higher-minded stuff. It's about how we think about ourselves in the universe and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's some really great jargon things. So the one I'm going to tell you about here today comes from the Moorovishik discontinuity. All right. this one before. No.

This is, I love it because it sounds, like a lot of these are great because they just sound wonderful. It sounds transcendental. I'm so excited. It does, right? It really does. So what this is, just straightforward, is it's the boundary between the Earth's crust and the mantle. Cool. So the Earth, as you might know, has a bunch of layers.

You've got the crust. You've got the mantle. You've got the core. And then there's other ways of chopping it up and other ways of dividing it. You'll probably see a bunch of different things. But broadly speaking, you've got those three things. And in between, so the crust, here's a very fun little fact for you. How heavy is the earth?

Order magnitude. I have no idea. I have no idea. It is 5 million billion tons. That's a lot of hippos. Okay. Mostly iron oxygen and silicon, which is rock. There's a ton of that.

The crust, the bit we live on. Okay. is 0.5% of that. Okay. Half a percent of that is the outside that we live on. And then below that is this more generally molten layer that's called the mantle. So this in the early 1900s, a guy named Andrea Mohorovishik was looking at earthquakes. And when you have an earthquake, that's waves that go through the earth. And he noticed that for some of these earthquakes, he would see the waves come by and then he would

see another set of the exact same waves come by. And what that meant is that if you, it meant that something weird was happening deep inside the earth. In particular, something was reflecting or refracting, two more jargon terms there. But so you know, like when you look at light going through a glass and you've got the straw

and the straw gets bent right at the boundary of the water, that's because light moves slower through water than it does through air. The speed changes. And that speed change makes it change direction a little bit as well. That's called refracting. It also reflects. It'll bounce off of that, which is where you see reflections from.

But these waves inside the earth work exactly the same way. So they go down and then they hit something where the speed changes, this little boundary, and they change direction a little bit, and they also speed up, as it turns out. It turns out this faster layer is the lower one. And so that's a discontinuity. That's a bit where the change is sudden, right? So that's what a discontinuity is. So this guy, Andrea Mohruvich, sees a discontinuity.

So eventually it gets named after him. I don't think he was the one who named after him. And he worked out and people later confirmed this is what's going on. This is the boundary between two different layers in the earth. And he actually started the whole field of seismology, or at least became one of the early people doing a lot of work, of figuring out what the earth looks like by looking at earthquakes. That's what you do.

You look at the seismic waves from earthquakes. You look at the way the earth shakes, and that tells you what's going on inside the earth. Now, so that's the Mahorovishik discontinuity. There's something you really need to know about geologists, though. This is really important. Okay. Is that geologists do not give a f***.

All the scientists, all scientists, geologists give the fewest number of fuchs. And where that comes up here, first of all, is that they never say Mahoravishik discontinuity. They call it the moho. Okay. And the other way that this comes up is that in the 1960s, thought, you know what we should do? We should drill down through the earth, get to the moho, which is tens of kilometers down. We should drill through it. And so the project to drill down to the mojo, they called Project Moho, which is amazing. Government-funded project, big NSF project

called Project Mohole, where they're going to dig down through the crest of the earth. This, again, was the mid-60s. Part of this was Sputnik inspired. We wanted to race the Soviets. The Soviets were maybe going to do the same thing. And in fact, they did. That's a whole other story. they did try. So they commissioned a project to do this. Now, if you were going to dig through the earth's crust, where would you do it? Oh, like somewhere low. I don't know. Like that's right. Yep. Okay, okay. I'm like in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I don't know. That's close, but what's the lowest point on the earth? Like the Mariana trench? Yeah, or the bottom of the ocean more generally. The crust is much thinner in the ocean than it is on continents by a lot.

It's a few kilometers thick in the oceans and it's tens on the continent. The continents are big and thick. That's actually why they're above sea. Like they're buoyant essentially like they kind of float up. They're really big and thick. So you want to dig in the ocean. So what you need is a boat that can send a drill to the bottom of the ocean and you want to do this where it's deep, not on the continental shelf. You know, there's sort of a shelf and then it falls off. You want you want the falling off parts, so you don't have to drill through that much rock. So you need a special boat that can send a drill down that thick. And this was the 60s. They didn't have a huge amount of it at this point. They didn't do it in the marina trench. That's a little bit much. But they did just

James Cameron down there. Honestly, if anyone's ever going to do this, it might be James Cameron. I'm spoiling that they didn't actually do it. But anyway, they settled on a place. This was partly run out of script. So they settled on a place kind of near San Diego by Guadalupe, which there's two Guadalups. I got so confused when I first read this because there's the little old French territory in the Caribbean, it's not that one. There's actually another island off the coast of Baja, California. At first, I thought this author was like, you don't understand geography, because they were like 50 miles east of Guadalupe and 250 miles south of San Diego. And I was like, what is that? But it turns out there's another island there called the same thing. So they

commission a ship to do this. And the ship is, was actually built by four oil companies. Okay. Because who wants to drill in the ocean? All righties. Continental Union, Shell and Standard had put together this boat. Project Mohole, they worked with them together to do this. They were going to do a pilot study to make sure it works, make sure the drilling works. You know, make sure, one of the biggest problems is you have to keep, if the boat moves, the whole drill apparatus snaps. And so they had to like figure out a way to keep the boat stationary in the middle of the ocean. This is before GPS, I believe. I don't actually know. I should check back. But, you know, this is in the mid-60s. So this was a hard problem. So they came up

with a way to do it using buoys and the boat actually has four engines, the point in four directions, so they can like fire the little things. Anyway, so they sail out and this is, this is a big deal. This is a huge government project. You've got these four oil companies involved. So Life magazine decides they're going to send a reporter, and they're going to write a big old cover article about this. And so they send this reporter out, they go do the thing. The actual, for those who don't remember, Life magazine was basically like Time magazine, They were competitors. It doesn't exist anymore, but it did back in the day.

I like to say that, you know, whenever life competes with time, you know who wins. So they sent this reporter. The headline is incredible. It is high drama of bold thrust through ocean floor. And it's this reporter's, like, impressions and, you know, he sailed on this whole expedition, which lasted several weeks. Okay. Now, there's a few things you really need to know about this article and this whole story.

First, as shows up in the very first paragraph of this article, the boat that they are on was named after the four oil companies that commissioned it. And if you remember correctly, those were Continental Union, Shell, and Standard. So Project Moholl set sail on the Cuss 1. They love. They love that. Told you, go not give a f***. That is what it is.

The other thing you need to know is that this reporter who sailed out there was John Steinbeck. Yeah, of course. Gosh. Yeah, the guy who wrote The Grapes of Wrath sailed on the Cuss 1 to watch Project Moholl dig a hole down to the Mohol. It's incredible. And Steinbeck was in love with this. I think he volunteered for the project. He actually, like, there's a whole side story here where you had a really good friend who was an oceanographer, sorry, not an oceanographer, a marine biologist. And this friend died tragically in a couple decades earlier than this. and it broke Steinbeck up, and there's one of the characters in one of his books is based on it.

There's a whole thing here. So he had this love of oceanography. Like, you know, you think of John Steinbeck obviously as the Grapes of Rath guy, right? The winter of our discontent, like all this crazy stuff, but not crazy stuff, these important books. But yeah, he had this love of oceanography. So I think when Life magazine was like, who wants to go do this? Signbeck's like, sign me up. Also, and this will amuse you as journalists, you used to be able to make money doing this.

I think they paid well. Right, this used to be like how authors made money between writing their little books. Yeah, I think this was in the 1960s magazine journalism paid bank. And you would write, yeah, anyway. Don't make me sad. But, okay, so Steinbeck was into this. He, he was so excited and his writing was his writing was Steinbeckian, right? Sure.

I read he used to view it, and that man can wax poetic about anything for a long. long time. I love used to meet it. And it's a long time. Exactly. Well, this was east of Guadalupe. And here's one, okay, he slips. So first of all, he gets very excited, but he also like slips in Steinbeckian things. So here's a passage. Willard Bascom, the director, gave a lecture on the geology and geophysics of the project, and everyone attended. Cooks, Seamenoff century, drillers and scientists. Their attention was so complete. And afterward, there were so many questions. The lecture pulled the group together into a unit. Now the drillers knew what they were drilling to find out.

To read the world's history, as you would, rings of a tree and in an area undisturbed from millions of years. The radio brought bad news and good. Bob Nold's mother had died and Pete Johnson's wife had an eight and a half pound boy. The wind is at 20 knots and we are making four knots still due west. That's one paragraph. Come on. The hero's journey, drilling rock. But he was really, really excited about what they were doing.

So the way it works is you send a drill down on a thread that's sort of flexible, obviously, it has to be. And it drills down. And then every once in a while, they would pull the drill bit up and send down a core, a thing that takes a core, which is like, I guess it's named after an app. I should look this up after like an Apple core. But it's like it's a thing that like, I just made that up. I don't know if that's true. But that is what it looks like. You dig down into the rock and you get the cylinder.

Like it's a long cylinder of rock that you pull back up so you can like look at the different layers and things in the earth. So they pulled that up. They would periodically pull up these cores. And he was excited. The first ones showed a bunch of fossils. They had to like rethink. The fossils weren't quite where they expected. The age of the rocks wasn't quite what they expected.

So they were learning stuff. And Steinbeck gets so excited about this. He keeps going on about like so many textbooks are going to have to get rewritten, which is a bit overwrought for science writing. like but he was he was into it he really wanted this to discover amazing things and to be fair this did bring up a lot of interesting information that you know the i think they were expecting a whole bunch of relatively recent fossils which they didn't see so they're like oh somehow the top layers got removed and we don't know why there were they learned a bunch of other things this was early days of plate tectonics about how the you know the earth has the the crust is actually broken up into plates that

move around. This was the era where they were sort of figuring out how that all worked, and this work helped them figure that stuff up as well. But, and this is the bit that is delightfully Steinbeckian. So they had been drilling, and like at one point, a thing broke off. They had to restart. There's all this drama. And every time they brought up a core, people got excited. One of the early cores, Steinbeck like reaches in and grabs a piece and the head scientist, like, don't do that. And like, it's very mad at him. So then they finally brought up the deepest core than anybody had ever brought up. This was, excuse me, you know, they were breaking records. And they looked at it and they were like, I think if we work out the math, this core is probably

$5,000 a pound, incredibly, incredibly expensive to get this thing up just from what they had spent and how big it was. I'm just going to, yeah, I'm just going to read you what he wrote as they bring this core up. Delight on the cuss. Sure. We brought up a great, core of basalt, stark blue and very hard, with extrusions of crystals and exuding in lines, beautiful under a magnifying glass. The scientists are guarding this core like tigers. Each one wants a fragment as a memento. We have broken drilling records every day, and now we have broken through to the second layer, which no one had ever seen before. We think that, by the way, that's not the, they didn't make it to the mantle. This was just another layer. Yeah. We figure this core

cost about $5,000 a pound. I asked for a piece and got a scowling refusal and so, I stole a small piece. He went back and he stole one. And then, quoting again, and then that damn chief scientist gave me a piece secretly. Made me feel terrible. This is the best part. Oh, shucks. I had to sneak in and replace the piece I had stolen. That's hilarious. But he kept the one the chief scientist gave him because, yeah, he wanted to that. Yeah. What a scamp. What a pal. It's incredible. So at that point Steinbeck actually had to leave, which he doesn't actually say in the article how he left because they're in a boat in the middle of the ocean, but I don't, I don't know, maybe they had helicopters. And he says, you know, there will be a part two where I finish, you know, tell you how this all

came out and more about this. And there never was a part two. The project, this was phase one of a three-phase project. It was already big enough. It needed congressional approval as a separate line item. Like, this was seriously expensive what they were doing. And it ended up getting mired in the stuff that happens. There was infighting between the different groups of scientists, did this. Oh, I forgot to tell you, the group that originally pushed for this was called the American Miscellaneous Society. It was just a bunch of scientists who got together like, we're interested in miscellaneous stuff, so let's call us that. And apparently this was actually a big problem in congressional approval because they're like, what the fuck do you mean? We're funding

something for American Miscellaneous Society. And if you look on their Wikipedia page, it's wonderful, it's very short. And it says their most significant project was Project Moholl. They list nothing else. I don't know that this group actually did anything else. But so there was infighting between various groups to get the approval. They had to go through Congress. And so the contract was awarded to like the fourth choice that was in the district by one of the people on the committee. And this company, it was an oil drilling company that had no experience in science and mismanaged. And then all of a sudden when they were pricing out the boats, the cost like tripled.

And then this was the mid-60s, late 60s, the Vietnam War was exploding. And so science budgets were going down at that point as they were funding the Vietnam War. So nothing else happened. That was it. They never made it down to the mojo. And in fact, we've never done it. It's 2026 at time of recording and we have not made it. There was a group that did dig up a bit of the mantle, but they cheated. They went to a mid-oceanic ridge where the mantle is coming up. And they went to the bit before it turns into the crust and got some mantle, which is very cool. It's a very cool project. But they didn't actually get to the mojo because where they drilled, there is no mojo. It's just the mantle. So yeah, no one's done it. The Russians tried it. The Russians actually tried it on land. And so they have dug the deepest land hole that has ever gotten. There's a bunch of reporting and videos on this hole, but they only made it a fraction of the way down before. I think they drilled for about 20 years and still only made it a tiny fraction of the way down.

But in a sign of the current trends in geopolitics, the next best attempt at this is actually has been started. There's another ship has been commissioned to possibly get there by 2030, 2035, something like that. And that ship is, of course, the main. Neng Jiang sailing out of Guangzhou, as I think we all are starting to come to expect. So that's the story of how John Steinbeck stole a piece of the deepest core ever dug out of the earth. Oh, wow.

Wow. That's great. I keep thinking of one of my favorite movies is The Last Skelton of Kedra, which is a 2001 spoof of 50s B horror. It's fantastic. But one of the main characters is a geologist, and his wife says at one point, well, I suppose if I had wanted a safe life, I wouldn't have married a man who studies rock. Yeah. Would you remind our listeners, we'll do this again at the end of the show. But your show on Dragon is pretty soon, right?

Yes. At the end of May, May 27th, here at Caviard, we're doing the first reading, their first staging, and there'll probably be more after that. We'll see how it goes. So come, see, tell me what you think and what works and what doesn't. There's a lot. We have to talk about Deus Ex Machina, talk about Tyconic. which is Tico Brahe's motto of the universe, alluvial salts.

There's a lot of fun stuff in there. Wow. Very cool. All right, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes?

Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it like it belongs to them.

So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. Okay, we're back. And Sarah Riley, tell me about some dark history of X-Axat. Yeah.

I can't wait. Honestly, this one is like, this is a fascinating tale. And you may have guessed it. I mean, unless you've been, like, hiding from the gym for the past couple years, you probably noticed, like, a lot of Pilates students. popping up. And yeah. I love Pilates. I love to hate it. I hate to love it. That's what I always say about Pilatea. Yes. Oh, yes. I mean, and I love it because I do not like to sweat a lot. So I'm like, I want to do a workout where I am not drenched and I still feel like I did something. So if you're like that,

then you're probably, you're probably a member of one of these tons of studios that are just everywhere. And, and like there's data to show that they're every year, apparently to the, according to like an industry report, participation shot up from like 9 million people to 12 to 13 million in the past like six years or something. And it's basically like the largest jump of any workout type across the U.S. And research for like one of the companies that kind of like provides Pilates reformers found that like 67% of instructors are constantly selling out their classes. So people are, people are all about the Pilates. And then there's, but sorry, but then there's all of the, things that aren't Pilates but use like their wacky proprietary take on a reformer for a totally different thing.

As somebody who does a lot of reformer Pilates and occasionally tries one of those other classes and I'm like, this is different. What are you doing? And they don't pretend as Pilates, but they took the reformer in. So I think like if you also included all of those. All of the, all of the different Latis out there, there is a lot going on. So, and yeah, and so when you think of Pilates, you probably think, is kind of like pricey, which is also backed in research. Like a lot of these classes, especially when you throw in the reformer or other like funky things, it's like $20 a class at least for some of these bigger cities. And, but despite it's like bougie, modern veneer,

the history of this exercise trend is like quite humble and really interesting. And so we have to fast forward to, or backwards, fast backwards to the 1880s. And this is where Joseph Pilates, the father of Pilates or Contrology is what he called it. So he was born near Dusseldorf and his dad, and you have to take all of this with a little bit of a grain assault because there, like, there are some really good sources out there. There's a couple of like interviews and things that he's done. He had an obituary in the New York Times. But it's also, you know, during that time period where there was a lot of mystery, there were wars going on. And so everything. It was really easy to reinvent yourself at that time. You could just tell a new

paper anything, frankly. It's true. This was before the age of Google and hunting people down on Instagram to make sure that they aren't fake people. So everything with a grain of salt. But yeah, so basically, according to some sources, his dad was a gymnast. His mom was like into natural medicine. So it kind of makes sense that he fell down this rabbit hole of founding Pilates.

And one of my favorite rumors that a lot of like Pilates experts love to like debate or like say just PR is that he was a sickly child. Like there are a couple of things that say like he has asthma or rickets or he had fevers and he used the movement to get through this. And like, but like a lot of people also think that it's just like a little cheeky bit of PR. And that comes back that Pilates cures everything. So I will return to this.

But yeah, so in his in his obituary is New York Times obituary, he yeah, he basically talks about how when he was a child, he like would lay in the woods and watch the animals run around, which is another similar, a theme in the Pilates story that he loves. He loves animals and saying that Pilates cures everything. So he's 20, he's in his 20s and 30s. So he basically, he's also doing gymnastics type stuff. And he and his brother were traveling around England as part of this circus troupe. And he was doing what's called a Greek statue act. And I, so I don't know 100% what this is. I was looking up, I was like, what is a Greek statue act? but I think it literally is just like choreographed poses to look like a Greek statue.

So, you know, it's like... Like the people who paint themselves silver and stand in the park? I think it has the similar energy to this. So basically, like, just like people, like fit people posing. Much like, you know, it's like the 19 teens. Like, anything goes. Like, you know what? Okay.

Earn your living being very, very fit. Do your thing. But yeah. So if you've been doing some like mental math in the background or just, I totally gave it away. But yeah, we're creeping up on world. War I. Things are about to get a little dicey. And in 1914, the UK declares war on Germany, and they passed the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914. And at this time, there's like more than 50,000

German immigrants living in the UK. A lot of them are in London. But basically, this was, this is huge for the German population in the UK. So some of the things that happened as a result of this or that Germans couldn't move more than five miles. And they had to register with the police when they did that. The German newspapers and clubs like went away. They closed down German owned businesses, confiscated property and assets without compensation for the owners, just like sad stuff that happens during war time. And the kind of spookiest part and definitely the spookiest for Mr. Polaris was that

the government introduced this like policy of wholesale internment of males of military age. So basically anybody from 17 to 55. And so they, yeah, they interned all of these people and they combined with deportation, And basically the Germans in the UK, the population was brought down by more than half. So a big deal. And the largest of the German internment camps was Nacalo, and it was on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, which is between England and Ireland. So it's like this cold, blustery place. I mean, I don't know if anybody's listening from the UK.

And right now it probably is kind of nice since it's summer, but like it's cold and windy. So yeah, not like the like most like fun place to be ever. And at the peak, the, like, location that this was at held like 23,000 men. So, wow. And so as I said, Joseph Pilates didn't do a ton of media. He was not like super into that kind of marketing in his time. So a lot of the next little bit is from this one interview he gave with Robert Wernick for Sports Illustrated in 1962, which obviously is like quite some time after this happened.

So again, I'm sprinkling some salt for you guys. But I'll read you a little bit about what he would. saying and like kind of how his time here inspired Pilates. So this is from Robert Wernick, and it says, Joe and all the others were interned in an abandoned hospital on the Isle of Man. Here, as Weiss lengthened into months and years, he watched his fellow prisoners sink into apathy and despair, with nothing to do but stare at the bare crumbling walls of their prison,

nothing to break the daily monotony, but the inadequate meals for the German submarine blockade was slowly starving England, and an occasional walk around the bare courtyard with nothing to look at, but an occasional starveling cat streaking after a mouse or a bird. Okay. So now we're back to animals. So the animals are a big deal for Joseph.

And the next passage, I'm going to keep reading you from this passage because it's just, you know what? Better from the horse's mouth. So this is a little bit more about both of the themes that I kind of notice in the story, which is, yeah, animals and Pilates curing all. But yeah, so basically the next little bit goes, it was the cats which did it. For though they were nothing but skin and bones, even the most animal-loving prisoners could hardly spare them anything but their own pitiful rations,

when their own children were begging to be fed, they were lithe and springy and terribly efficient as they aimed for their prey. Why were the cats in such good shape, so bright-eyed, while the humans were growing everyday paler, weaker, apathetic creatures ready to give up if they'd caught a cold or fell down and sprained an ankle? The answer came to Joe when he began carefully observing the cats and analyzing their motions for hours at a time. He saw them when they had nothing else to do,

stretching their legs out, stretching, keeping their muscles limber alive. He began working out an orderly series of exercises to stretch the human muscles, all the human muscles. He began demonstrating these exercises to the dejected figures around him. And since they had nothing else to do, they began to do the exercises too. How cute is that?

Continuing. Awkwardly and timorously at first, but under his firm supervision, they became more and more confident, more and more bouncy like cats. They ended the war in better shape than when it started, and when the great influenza epidemic came sweeping over the countries that had fought in the war, not one of them came down with it. I'm sure that's definitely true. Yeah, like so just dump out. All of us all, yeah, because like ended the war in better shape than when he started. There's not really a peer review study on that. So, but I mean, it's a nice story. And so like all,

Also, there is some, like, some, like, lore with the reformer here is that he, like, took, so the story kind of goes that he took his knowledge to the internment camp hospital where some Pilates practitioners and experts say he began developing, like, the workout equipment using hospital beds and springs to, like, make the preliminary reformer, which is, that's what it's like. That's pretty much what if you've ever been to one of these classes. It's just a very uncomfortable bed, which I reckon is pretty similar to what was going on. But, yeah, that's not really been confirmed by historical evidence.

because people are fascinated with Pilates, like the internment camp actually keeps like a really good, like historical record. There's a great website. If you want to fall down this rabbit hole, as I did, with like pictures of like, like, who was Joseph Pilates at this time? But yeah, unfortunately, that's still a little bit of a little mythos. But anyway, fast forward is the Roaring 20s.

Joseph Pilates took a little trip back to Germany for a second. And then he was like, let's go to America. And some rumors have it that it's like on this boat to America. he meets his wife Clara, which is a, she's a very important part of the Pilates story as well. And that's also part of the fun of the story is that it's not just him. Like there's all of these other people that kind of make Pilates what it is. And you'll see that shortly. But yeah, so people basically credit Clara with like the one who made Pilates super adaptable to anybody,

which is part of kind of why everybody, like a lot of people are into Pilates because it's like, if you're pregnant or if you're elderly, if you have a disability or you're, you were recently injured. Like, you can still do a lot of Pilates without hurting. Unlike, you know, like, you can't, like, just go, like, run on a, when you're hurt or when you're, you know, so it's a good exercise for people that are struggling a little bit with something. Or if you're like me and you just, like, like, like to exercise while laying down on the ground.

So it's very popular. But in New York, like, this is kind of where things pick up. And he gets this, like, 8th Avenue gymnasium and, like, Catherine Hepburn is coming. And he files patents for all of his, like, reformers. and like the magic circle and stuff like that. And you can still find these patents, which is very funny. I mean, I love, I love looking up like a weird patent. And like in the reporting, I wrote this story for Popsie a couple of months ago.

And I remember just having like a thousand patent. Like just strange, strange equipment. But anyway, yeah. So he trained the next generation of Pilates teachers as well during this, which are the Pilates elders, which you, if you like fall down another rabbit hole with the Pilates stuff, A lot of these people, like, you know, lived until, like, the, like, early, like, 2000s. So there's a lot of, a lot of information on these guys as well. And so a lot of the Pilates elders kind of added their own flair to Pilates.

So some kind of stuck with, like, the classic Joseph of it all and others, like, did more dancey type stuff. And so one of the guys that did the more dancey type stuff, he was a modern dancer. His name's Ron Fletcher. And so when Pilates really went bananas is in the 70s. So he opened a studio in Beverly Hills above this famous beauty part. belonging to Ada Gray, who was like the beauty queen of Beverly Hills in the 70s. And all these famous ladies like Bessie Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan would go to the salon

to get their hair did. And then they'd go see Ron after to go get their Pilates workout. And there's this great interview with him with The Guardian in 2008 that I stumbled upon where it's like, this is where it kind of like exploded. And Fletcher is often credited with taking Pilates off the reformer and like really onto the floor because of his dance background, which I think is. really cool. And for me, I'm like, even though I look like a like a cockroach on the ground, like I'm like, it feels a lot harder for me on the ground than with the reformer. So if, so there is some like there's some validity to that. But anyway, like there's a little bit of like bonus drama at

the end like in 2000 because there was a hubup in trying to trademark the Pilates name. Like can we like what is it? So a Manhattan federal court around then declared that Pilates was an exercise method and not trademarkable. So it's kind of like yoga or aerobics, which is why we have like, like, like tons of whatever Lotties and all of the things that have spun off. So yeah. So Pilates has kind of taken on a life of its own, of course. But that's kind of like in line with the story of it. And while Pilates is like a great form of exercise,

it will not like cure everything. Exercise is good for you. People do it. Do what makes you happy. But yeah, well cure rickets. I'm not sure about all of that. But yeah.

So basically if you ever think about Pilates as being like a like a highfalutin kind of thing, it's not always been highfalutin. you can always like go back to the history of this thing and it was I mean in some way even if it's not as a big of a as a phenomenon in the Isle of Man internment camp as Joseph Pilates made it out to be that's where it's that's where it's kind of got its little it's it's baby steps which is I always think it's kind of fun so it's not just the Lulu Lemon moms there's a there's a lot of people involved in the history of Pilates and try it out if you're fascinated after this but yeah that's the

little tale of Joseph Pilates. I love how the combination of Pilates being such a ubiquitous thing now and the surname Pilates, not being a common surname, really makes Joseph Pilates sound like

a made up person. And it's like he didn't even name it Pilates. Like everybody was just like, okay, Contrology sounds bananas. Like we're not doing that. Palates sounds cooler. Imagine if he had If I had like made a new workout and I'd been like, it's feltment. That, yeah, like that would have been unhinged, Joseph.

So good for him for not doing that. But with the name like Pilates, come on. Is it a German? Like, do we know what it is? Honestly, when I hear it, I think Pontus Pilate and I'm like, this is very different. So there are, like, again, grain of salt, there's some sources that say his parents were Greek and they were just living in Germany. So I don't think it's like, but, you know, I don't think we can get Joseph Palates ancestry.com results. But that would make sense as to why the name's pretty unique.

But yeah, yeah. Wow. When you said that this was due to an internment camp, I was expecting a much darker story. No, it's like a heartwarming story. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think years ago, we had an episode where Claire talked about how treadmills were invented as a method of torture to, like, keep prisoners in line. So I kind of...

That was sort of what I was expected. But no, yeah, pretty heartwarming. Love it. Well, thank you both so much for coming on. And Ben, would you remind our listeners where they can see your show and what? Yeah, head to caveat.n.YC. You can see all of our shows. There's a lot of science ones.

We have Facts Machine, which is a bunch of interesting facts. I feel like people here might like that. We're starting a new show soon called Comedians Interview Experts, which is what it sounds like. Should be very fun. But, yeah, on May 27th, I'll be doing the first reading of jargon. so look after that as well. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie,

who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.