We Did it Joe (Pilates), They Did Surgery on a Cocaine Hippo, Steinbeck Digs Deep (Literally)

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:57Speaker 02

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• 1:29Rachel Feltman?

  At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 Feltman.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  I'm Sarah Kylie Watson.

• 1:51Speaker 05

  And I'm Ben Lillie.

• 1:52Rachel Feltman?

  Ben, welcome to the show.

• 1:53Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 1:55Rachel Feltman?

  Listeners can't see what's in Ben's background because we are staunchly audio-only, mostly because I record from my pantry. But Ben is sitting in our favorite venue in the world, Caveat, because it's his. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

• 2:11Speaker 05

  Sure. Hi. Yeah, I'm sitting here at Caveat in the Lower Side of 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 08, 09. Started doing stuff, started performing with The Moth and other places. Took 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 that 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.

• 2:49Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, it's an awesome spot. And it's funny, I was thinking about when you first announced your plans for Caveat. The...

• 2:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:58Rachel Feltman?

  I recall the vibe in the science media community being like, "Very cool idea. Sad that it will definitely not..." So mean! "...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?

• 3:17Speaker 05

  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?

• 3:24Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  To be fair to them, the vast majority of venues close. And in fact, I learned this after we started the process, the majority close before they open.

• 3:45Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  They weren't wrong.

• 3:48Rachel Feltman?

  And yet, and yet.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  We did survive, yeah.

• 3:50Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Well, we're thrilled to have you on and definitely gonna start working on our next live show plans 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 and vote, but we don't do that on the show anymore because it was always a three-way tie. Sarah Carley, what's your tease?

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, so my tease is that today's trendiest workout got its start in a World War I internment camp.

• 4:35Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:36Rachel Feltman?

  That is, that fits with how I feel about a lot of trendy workouts.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  You know what? And this is my favorite trendy workout, which like, so here we go.

• 4:46Rachel Feltman?

  Great. Can't wait to hear more. Ben, what's your tease?

• 4:49Speaker 05

  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.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Love bizarre stories.

• 4:59Rachel Feltman?

  My tease is that you've heard that there's more than one way to skin a cat, which like, yeah, why did we say that? I don't know. But there's also more than one way to sterilize a hippo.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 5:10Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna 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 Weirdest Thing a few times because cocaine hippos are straight down the middle for us. Like, obviously, we're gonna talk about the cocaine hippos. And they're back in the news because sadly, the Colombian government has made the decision to cull many of them. And I wanna, I wanna 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

• 5:54Rachel Feltman?

  of animals at his estate. Because really what self respecting drug lord in the 80s didn't have their own zoo full of illegally imported animals. Be freaking 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 1,000 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.

• 6:38Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 7:18Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 7:30Speaker 05

  They're never, they're never, they always come up as the surprise.

• 7:32Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly. 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. You know, their faces are so round. I think it's like, you know, the like kiki buba thing where it's like, you know, the sharp, sharp objects versus objects. I think hippos are maybe the most buba 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 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 like to attract each other. That's not even when they're mad at you.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  That's friendly.

• 8:18Rachel Feltman?

  That's a friendly hippo. Yeah, they will. 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, 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, Colombia. And the hippo population was growing at almost 10% per year.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 8:58Rachel Feltman?

  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 1,000.

• 9:09Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 9:26Rachel Feltman?

  In reading about this, I saw that sterilization efforts were really earnest. They like really tried very hard for several years. But it, that 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 gonna, we're gonna 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, there's also some local sentiment that,

• 10:12Rachel Feltman?

  you know, I think it's, it's very tied up in the legacy of Pablo Escobar. 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. So, 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 do 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

• 10:57Rachel Feltman?

  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 corral. 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 corralling 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

• 11:42Rachel Feltman?

  things don't exactly work out, then you've got an 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 hippo's mouth open for the breathing apparatus that made sure that she kept breathing while under anesthesia. This is so much. Yeah, and remember, they have some of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom, about 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.

• 12:26Rachel Feltman?

  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 hippo's 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. Mm-hmm. And, again, again, this is happening in the mud.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  In the field.

• 13:07Rachel Feltman?

  At night. In the mud at night, perfect, perfect. Love that.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Presumably with other hippos around.

• 13:12Rachel Feltman?

  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 gonna 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 Gonokon, which is an animal contraceptive. It's used in various zoo and domesticated animals. And it works on both males and females.

• 13:53Rachel Feltman?

  And the US actually donated a bunch, the Department of Agriculture donated some for use in Colombia. But it's so pretty expensive, the dose for a hippo was 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 probably gonna cause, if not permanent, then pretty long-term infertility. But in 2023, you know, a few years later, a study came out that was like, this actually isn't working. We really need to up our game.

• 14:38Rachel Feltman?

  That was the study that estimated we were gonna have a thousand of these hippos by, it was a 2050. Good lord. And, yeah. And they were like, this is gonna be really expensive. It's gonna 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 gonna 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, to get serious. And in response to that paper, still, the government did, really didn't want to euthanize these hippos. Yeah.

• 15:23Rachel Feltman?

  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 gotta find the hippo, you gotta hit it with your birth control dart, it's gotta go through two inches of skin. And then you gotta do that a couple more times at some point in the future, all while 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 like, always in the same place and you're always gonna find them. Like, they roam, they wander. And also remember, they will absolutely [__] you up. You know, Wu Deng, these guys are not, she's a pygmy, by the way, which is still not exactly

• 16:05Rachel Feltman?

  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 Wu Deng might be your friend, but still, you know, respect your, respect your distance. But yeah, the big boys are very territorial. They kill an estimated 500 people a year in Africa, where they're, of course, native. Now in Colombia, where there are far fewer of them, there are no known Fatalities tied to cocaine 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.

• 16:49Rachel Feltman?

  Also in 2021, a hippo attacked a farmer and he had multiple broken bones. Hippos have apparently taken to charging at people like 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 a 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 upset you, I totally get that.

• 17:34Rachel Feltman?

  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, trying to avoid euthanizing any of these hippos. And it really is gonna get totally out of control in a way that they will not, they will not be able to put that cat back in the bag if they don't do something pretty drastic now.

• 18:02Rachel Feltman?

  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 manage to have hippos. And I was like, I think by sharing baby hippos. Like, I think the reason we have hippos in zoos. Ship them when they're small. 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.

• 18:45Rachel Feltman?

  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 palate 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.

• 19:28Rachel Feltman?

  And she was too weak to stand up and nurse, which is what they normally do. They don't spring up ready to go, like most wild animals. Her mom sniffed at her and pretty much laid down to take a nap. It was 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 is typical, for some reason, we don't know why, she got out and finished on land. Otherwise, the baby would have like, immediately drowned.

• 20:09Rachel Feltman?

  Which is, zookeepers think, why no other zoo had had a preemie hippo situation? Because they asked around, they were like, does anybody know what to do with a preemie hippo? And people were like, absolutely not. Never, never had that. So once it became clear that Bebe, 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, rejected them the way Bebe had. There's a company that creates and sells animal formulas for zoos. But when they went looking for a hippo recipe in the database...

• 20:54Rachel Feltman?

  There was only like a really basic entry from the 60s, I think. Oh, good. Which is basically a baby hippo had died and they'd been like, okay, well, we have, this hippo is lactating, so like, let's get some and take a sample. But they remembered the 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. Yeah. 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.

• 21:39Rachel Feltman?

  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 caloric 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 world's largest exotic milk repository. Oh, my God. Which also kind of sounds like something that Pablo Escobar would have as his house, but for different reasons. Yeah.

• 22:24Rachel Feltman?

  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

• 23:09Rachel Feltman?

  2,500 pounds. Yeah, so she's a

• 23:12Speaker 05

  Still a baby.

• 23:13Rachel Feltman?

  Still 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, well, she's described as chubby for her size. She's like a little, a little short. A little, little small bone. Yeah, she's petite, but she's put on weight beautifully. So that's our, that's our happy hippo story to wrap things up. And yeah, hippos 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

• 23:53Rachel Feltman?

  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.

• 24:02Rachel Feltman?

  It was, it was a great work trip.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  Fun trip.

• 24:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, hippos, man.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  Hippos.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  That's amazing.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  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?

• 24:20Rachel Feltman?

  Just because of, just because of their papa, Pablo. Um, no, yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be?

• 24:29Rachel Feltman?

  Listen, you thought cocaine, you thought cocaine bear was intense. Cocaine hippo, actually way worse.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 24:35Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  And then, and then the, 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?

• 24:42Speaker 04

  That is a good standard.

• 24:44Rachel Feltman?

  I, 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 gonna happen if we don't deal with the hippos. Cause 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,

• 25:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:10Rachel Feltman?

  ultimately humane way to go. And then they sort of like 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 gonna, you know, have a calf every two years if they don't, don't stop them. So, yeah, my assumption would be that they're probably going for the, the young reproductive females primarily. Because, you know, they're, they're really okay with as many of these hippos as possible, living out their hippo lives and hopefully not killing anybody.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  Going to schools, yeah.

• 25:54Rachel Feltman?

  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 with no warning. But it is pretty dangerous. So we'll see, we'll see how it goes. We'll keep you all updated on hippos. But, you know, pour, pour one out. Pour one out. For those, those girls and boys. They had a good run. They really did.

• 26:25Rachel Feltman?

  The government tried so hard not to kill these hippos, guys. I really cannot overstate that.

• 26:30Speaker 05

  That's a lot of effort.

• 26:32Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 28:12Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Ben, who's drooling into the earth? Tell me more.

• 28:17Speaker 05

  All right, all right. So this comes from, I'm doing a stage show about jargon. So 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, 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. Right? You're a science writer, you understand this, right? But so over the years, I'm also like, some of it is really [bleep] cool. It's, there's some great stuff. So I'm doing a whole show about it. It's, it's.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  There's higher minded stuff. It's about how we think about ourselves in the universe and 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 Mahoravishik discontinuity.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  All right.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  Have you all heard of this one before?

• 29:13Rachel Feltman?

  No.

• 29:14Speaker 05

  This is, I love it because it's sound like a lot of these are great because they just sound wonderful.

• 29:20Rachel Feltman?

  It sounds transcendental.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  I'm so excited.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  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.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  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, here's a very fun little fact for you. How heavy is the Earth?

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Order of magnitude.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  I have, I have no idea.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I didn't either. I had no idea. It is five million billion tons.

• 30:02Rachel Feltman?

  That's a lot of hippo.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  Mostly iron, iron, oxygen and silicon, which is rock. There's just a ton of that. The crust, the bit we live on.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:12Speaker 05

  Is 0.5% of that.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:15Speaker 05

  Like half a percent of that is the outside that we live on. And then below that is this more generally molten layer that's, that's called the mantle. So this, in the early 1900s, a guy named Andrea Mahoravishik 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, 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, when you look at light going through a glass and you, you've got the straw and the straw gets

• 30:58Speaker 05

  bent right, 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 the 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 Mohorovishik, sees a discontinuity. So eventually it gets named after him. I don't think he was the one named after him.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  And he worked out and people later confirmed this is, 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 Mohorovishik discontinuity. There's something you really need to know about geologists, though. This is really important. Is that geologists do not give a [BLEEP]. All scientists, geologists give the fewest number of [BLEEPs].

• 32:26Speaker 05

  And where that comes up here, first of all, is that they never say Mohorovishik discontinuity. They call it the Moho. And the other way that this comes up is that in the 1960s, they 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 Moho, they called Project Moho. Which is amazing. Government-funded project, big NSF project called Project Moho. Where they're gonna dig down through the crust 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 gonna do the same thing. And in fact, they did. That's a whole other story. Or they did try. So they commissioned a project to do this.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Now, if you were going to dig through the earth's crust, where would you do it?

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Oh, like somewhere low. I don't know, like.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  That's right. Yep.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. I'm like at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  That's close, but what's the lowest, what's the lowest point on the earth?

• 33:27Rachel Feltman?

  Like the Mariana Trench?

• 33:30Speaker 05

  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, they're 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 the shelf and then it falls off. You want, you want the falling off part. So you don't have to drill through that much rock. So you need a special boat that can, that can send a drill down that thick. And this was the sixties. They didn't have a huge amount of it at this point. They didn't do it in the Mariana Trench. That's a little bit much, but they did.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Just James Cameron down there.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  Honestly, if anyone's ever going to do this, it might be James Cameron. I'm spoiling that they didn't, didn't actually do it. 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 Guadalupe's. 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 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, that makes sense.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  What is that?

• 34:45Speaker 05

  But it turns out, it turns out there, there was another island there called the same thing. So they, they commissioned a ship to do this and the ship is, was actually built by four oil companies. Because who wants to drill in the ocean?

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  Continental, Union, Shell and Standard had put together this boat. Project Moho, they worked with them together to, 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, the, the, 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 that. But, you know, this is, this is in the mid 60s. So, this was a hard problem. So they, they came up with a way to do it using buoys. And the, the boat actually has four engines that point in four directions. So they can like, fire the, the little things. Anyway, so they, 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.

• 35:44Speaker 05

  So Life Magazine decides they're gonna send a reporter. And they're gonna write a big old cover article about this. And, so this, they, they send this reporter out, they go do the thing. The actual, for, for those who don't remember, Life Magazine was basically like Time Magazine. They were competitors. It, 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, and the headline is, is incredible. It is "High Drama of Bold Thrust Through Ocean Floor." And it's this reporter's, like, impressions and recor-, you know, they say, he sailed on, on this, this whole expedition, which lasted several weeks. Okay, now there's a few things you, you really need to know about this article, and, and this whole story.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  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 Moho set sail on the Cuss One.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  They love, they love that.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  I told you, geologists do not give a [bleep]. That is what it is. The other thing you need to know is that this reporter, who sailed out there, was John Steinbeck.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh my gosh.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, the guy who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" sailed on the Cuss One to watch Project Moho dig a hole down to the Moho.

• 37:07Speaker 05

  It's incredible. And Steinbeck was in love with this. He, I think he volunteered for the project. He actually, like, he had a, there's a whole side story here where he had a really good friend who was an oceanographer, sorry, not an oceanographer, marine biologist. And this friend died tragically in a couple decades earlier than this. And it broke Steinbeck up. And it was one of the characters in one of his books is based on it. There's a whole thing here. So he, he had this love of oceanography. Like, you know, you think of John Steinbeck, obviously, as the Grapes of Wrath guy, right? The Winter of Our Discontent, like, all this crazy stuff, but not crazy stuff, these important books. But, but yeah, he had this love of oceanography. So I think when Life Magazine was like, who wants to go do this? Steinbeck'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.

• 37:52Rachel Feltman?

  Right. This used to be like how, how authors made money between writing their little books.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that this was in the 1960s, magazine journalism paid back. And you'd write, yeah, anyway.

• 38:06Rachel Feltman?

  Don't make me sad.

• 38:07Speaker 05

  But, okay, so Steinbeck was into this. He, he was so excited. And his writing was, his writing was Steinbeckian, right?

• 38:16Rachel Feltman?

  Sure. I've read East of Eden. That man can wax poetic about anything for a long time. I love East of Eden. And it's a long time.

• 38:25Speaker 05

  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, here's a passage. Willard Bascom, the director, gave a lecture on the geology and geophysics of the project, and everyone attended, cooks, seamen off sentry, 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 for 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

• 39:09Speaker 05

  and we are making four knots still due west. That's one paragraph.

• 39:13Rachel Feltman?

  Wow. Come on.

• 39:14Speaker 05

  Who thinks he'd write that?

• 39:15Rachel Feltman?

  The hero's journey, drilling rock.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  But he was, he was really, really excited about what they were doing. So what they, the, the way it works is you, you send a drill down on a thread that's sort of flexible, obviously it has to be. And it, it drills down and then every once in a while, they would pull the drill bit up and send down a core, a, 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 don't, I just made that up. I don't know if that's true.

• 39:48Rachel Feltman?

  But that is what it looks like.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  So like you dig down into the rock and you get the cylinder, like it's, it's a long cylinder of rock that you pull back up. So you can like, look at the different layers and, and things in the earth. So they, they pulled that up. They, they, they would periodically pull up these cores. And yeah, they, 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 gonna 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, to love, discover amazing things. And to be fair, this did bring up a lot of interesting information that, that, you know, the, I think the,

• 40:32Speaker 05

  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, 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, this is the bit that is delightfully Steinbeckian. So they, 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 is like, don't do that.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  And like he gets very mad at him. So then they, they finally brought up the deepest core that anybody had ever brought up. This was, um, excuse me, you know, they, they were breaking records and they, they looked at it and they were like, I think if we, 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, and how big it was.

• 41:39Speaker 05

  I'm just gonna, yeah, I'm just gonna 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, 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 stole one.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  And then, quoting again, and then that damn chief scientist gave me a piece secretly. Made me feel terrible.

• 42:30Speaker 05

  This is the best part. Oh shucks. I had to sneak in and replace the piece I had stolen. That's hilarious.

• 42:38Speaker 05

  But he kept the one the chief scientist gave him because yeah, he wanted 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 on 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, this was seriously expensive what they were doing. And it, it ended up getting mired in, in the stuff that happens. There was infighting between the different groups of scientists that did this.

• 43:17Speaker 05

  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 this that. And apparently this was actually a big problem in congressional approval because they're like, what the do you mean? We're, we're funding something. Miscellaneous.

• 43:36Speaker 05

  And if you look, if you look on their Wikipedia page, it was wonderful. It's very short and it says their most significant project was Project Moho. They list nothing else. I don't, I don't know that this group actually did anything else. But so there was, 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 sixties, late sixties. The Vietnam War was exploding and so budgets were, 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 Moho.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  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 was coming up and they went to the bit before it turns into the crust and got some mantle, which was very cool. It was a very cool project, but they didn't actually get to the Moho because where they drilled, there is no Moho. It's just, 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, 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, over, I think they drilled for about 20 years and still only made it a tiny fraction of the way down.

• 45:01Speaker 05

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

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 45:31Rachel Feltman?

  That's great.

• 45:34Rachel Feltman?

  I keep thinking of one of my favorite movies is The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, 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 rocks."

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 45:54Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Would you remind our listeners, we'll do this again at the end of the show, but your show on Dargon is pretty soon, right?

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Yes. At the end of May, May 27th here at Caveat, we're doing the first reading, the 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 Braja's model of the universe, alluvial salts. There's a lot of fun stuff in there.

• 46:18Rachel Feltman?

  Wow. Very cool. All right, we're going to take one more break, and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18+.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  Born from the intensity of a knight in the Eternal City. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine-leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at macys.com.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 47:58Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Sarah Kylie, tell me about some dark history of exercise.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:03Rachel Feltman?

  I can't wait.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  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, from the gym for the past couple of years, you probably noticed like a lot of Pilates studios popping up. And yeah.

• 48:18Rachel Feltman?

  I love Pilates. I love to hate it. I hate to love it. That's what I always say about Pilates.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  Yes. Oh, yes. I mean, and I, 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 everywhere. Apparently, according to like, 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, the largest jump of any workout type across the US. And research for like, one of the companies that kind of like provides Pilates reformers, found that like 60%, 67% of instructors are constantly selling out their classes. So people are, people are

• 49:06Speaker 04

  all about the Pilates. And

• 49:08Rachel Feltman?

  And then there's, yeah, 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 it's Pilates, but they took the reformer in. So I think like, if you also included

• 49:32Speaker 04

  All of the inspo, all of the, all of the different Pilates out there. There is a lot going on. So, and yeah. And, and so when you think of Pilates, you probably think it's kind of like pricey, which is also backed in research. Like a lot of these classes, especially when you throw in the reformer, 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, according,

• 50:16Speaker 04

  and you have to take all of this with a little bit of a grain of salt 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 a, 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 every-

• 50:34Rachel Feltman?

  It was really easy to reinvent yourself at that time. You could just tell a newspaper anything, frankly.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  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, so everything with a grain of salt. But, 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 is 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 is just like a little cheeky bit of PR.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  And, and that comes back that, that Pilates cures everything. So I will return to this. But yeah, so in his, in his obituary, his 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 twenties and thirties. 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, I, so I don't know a hundred percent what this is. I was looking up.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  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,

• 52:07Speaker 05

  Like the people who paint themselves silver and stand in the park?

• 52:10Speaker 04

  I think it has the similar energy to this. So, so basically like- Just like people, like fit people posing, which like, you know, it's like the nineteen 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 One. Things are about to get a little dicey. And in nineteen fourteen, the UK like declares war on Germany and they passed the Aliens Restriction Act of nineteen fourteen. And, and at this time, there is like more than fifty thousand German immigrants living in the UK. A lot of them are in London.

• 52:48Speaker 04

  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 are 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 out during wartime. And the kind of spookiest part, and definitely the spookiest for Mr. Pilates was that the government introduced this like policy of wholesale internment of males of military age. So basically anybody from seventeen to fifty five. And so they, yeah, they intern all of these people and they combined with deportation.

• 53:28Speaker 04

  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 Nacolo, 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 this, at the peak, the like location that this was at held like twenty three thousand men. So.

• 54:02Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  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 Warnock for Sports Illustrated in nineteen sixty two, which obviously is like quite some time after this happened. So again, I'm sprinkling some salt for you guys, but, but I'll read. Do a little bit about what he was saying and like kind of how his time here inspired Pilates. So this is from, from Robert Wernick and it says, Joe and all the others were interned in an abandoned hospital on the Isle of Man. Here, as weeks lengthened into months and years, he watched his fellow prisoners sink into apathy and despair.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  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 with slowly starving England. And an occasional walk around the bare courtyard with nothing to look at but an occasional starving 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 gonna, I'm gonna keep reading you from this passage. Cause 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 noticed 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.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  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 life 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 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, stretching, keeping their muscles limber alive. He began working out an orderly series of exercises to stretch the human muscles, all the human muscles.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  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, in the war, not one of them came down with it.

• 56:38Rachel Feltman?

  Sure, that's, I'm sure that's definitely true. Yeah.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, like so, just dump out all of us all, yeah, cuz 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, it's a nice story. And so, like, also, there is like some like lore with the reformer here is that he like took, so the, the story kinda 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,

• 57:11Rachel Feltman?

  That's what it's like.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  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, who was Joseph Pilates at this time? But yeah, unfortunately, that's still a little bit of a little mythos. But anyway, fast forward, it's the roaring twenties. 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, that he meets his wife Clara, which is, uh, uh, she's a very important part of the Pilates story as well.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  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, who made Pilates super adaptable to anybody, which is part of kinda why everybody, like, a lot of people are into Pilates, cuz it's like, if you're pregnant, or if you're elderly, if you have an, a disability, or 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, on, 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, or if you're like me, and you just like, like to exercise while laying down on the ground.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  So, it's very popular, but in, in New York, like, this is kinda where things pick up. And he gets this like, Eighth Avenue Gymnasium, and like Catherine Hepburn is coming, and he, Patents for all of his like reformers and like this, 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, I wrote this story for Popsai a couple of months ago and I remember just having like a thousand patent. Like, 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.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  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 dancy type stuff. And so one of the guys that did the more dancy type stuff, he was a modern dancer. His name's Ron Fletcher. And so when Pilates really went bananas is in the seventies. So he opened a studio in Beverly Hills above this famous beauty parlor belonging to Ada Gray, who was like the beauty queen of Beverly Hills in the seventies. And all these famous ladies like Besi Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan would go to the salon. So like get their hair did and then they'd go see Ron after to go get their Pilates workout. And

• 1:00:03Speaker 04

  there's this great interview with him with the Guardian in 2008 that I stumbled upon where it's like, this is where the, 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, I, 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 with the reformer. So if, so there is some like, there is 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 hubbub 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.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  So it's kind of like yoga or aerobics, which is why we have like tons of whatever lattes. And all of the things that have spun off. So yeah, so it Pilates has kind of taken on a life of its own, of course, and 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, that it 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 big of a as a phenomenon in the Isle of Man internment camp as Joseph

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Pilates made it out to be, that's where that's where it kind of got its little is its baby steps, which is, I always think it's kind of fun. So it's not just the Lululemon 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.

• 1:01:51Rachel Feltman?

  I love I love how the combination of, you know, 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.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's it's like he didn't even name it Pilates. Like, everybody was just like, okay, Contrology sounds bananas. Like, we're not, we're not doing that. Pilates sounds cooler.

• 1:02:14Rachel Feltman?

  Imagine if he had, if I had like made a new workout and I'd been like, it's felt that, yeah, like, that would have been unhinged, Joseph. So good for him for not doing that. But with a name like Pilates.

• 1:02:27Speaker 05

  Is it a German? Like, do we know what it is? Because honestly, when I hear it, I think Pontus Pilate. And I'm like, this is very different.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  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 JosephPilatesAncestry.com results. But that that would make sense as to why the name's pretty unique. But yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 05

  I'll be honest.

• 1:02:51Rachel Feltman?

  Well.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  When when you said that this was due to an internment camp, I was expecting a much darker story.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  No, it's like a war, heartwarming story. Like, yeah.

• 1:03:02Rachel Feltman?

  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 expecting. But no, yeah, pretty heartwarming.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  Love it.

• 1:03:21Rachel Feltman?

  Well, thank you both so much for coming on. And Ben, would you remind our listeners where they can see your show and what?

• 1:03:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, head to caveat.nyc. 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 out for that as well.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, 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.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

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