Hold These Balls and Nap, Dickens’ Spontaneous Combustion, Men Don’t Know Themselves

Adam Conover joins Rachel and Lauren to talk about his newest standup special. The trio discuss human sexuality, faking male orgasms, napping while holding a heavy metal key and a plate, and an ego war concerning human spontaneous combustion. 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 Shop now at https://Fabletics.com/WEIRDEST to get 70–80% off everything when you sign up as a new VIP. 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.

• 0:00Rachel Feltman?

  I feel like this type of year, everybody wants to be cozy. I know, not really a hot take. Fabletics does such a good job putting together color-coordinated pieces with really cute tailoring that I know are gonna feel really nice to wear. So I can feel cozy without sacrificing style and also without adding one more thing to my to-do list. Shop now at fabletics.com/weirdest to get 70 to 80% off everything when you sign up as a new VIP. Take a quick style quiz and be sure to select weirdest when prompted to unlock this offer. Cozy season favorites can go fast. Again, that's fabletics.com/weirdest for 70 to 80% off everything as a new VIP.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, "I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York," or, "Why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse?" We also solve non-car-related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.

• 1:21Rachel 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 Teltman.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  I'm Lauren Leffler.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm Adam Conover.

• 1:45Rachel Feltman?

  Adam, welcome to the show.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me on. I'm thrilled to be here.

• 1:49Rachel Feltman?

  Well, I feel like a lot of our listeners have probably come across some of your work, but would you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about what you do. And I understand you also have a new special out.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Yes. So I'm a comedian, podcaster, YouTuber. I've been on television for many years. Television kind of doesn't exist in the same way it used to. So, you know, I'm available wherever there's a moving image on your screen, whatever app you happen to be using. I do a podcast called Factually. I do sort of like, I'm known for doing informational comedy, comedy that, you know, tells you about uncomfortable facts you didn't know and things like that. I interview a lot of experts. I'm also a stand-up comic. I'm constantly on the road. And my new special is out October 23rd on YouTube. And it's a lot more about my personal life, is what I've been writing a lot about more lately. But I'm just, I'm just interested in millions of things. So I'm excited to be here and talk about them.

• 2:41Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, no, that's, we love getting people on who love learning stuff and talking about it, hopefully in a goofy, silly way, but.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  No, I'm very serious about it. No, we can't be, no, and we're learning. Learning is serious business. We can't.

• 2:56Rachel Feltman?

  It's true. It's not fun at all. I hate being here, personally.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Chalk down your vegetables. That's my philosophy.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  It's a good one. I do, I think of, I think of you, Adam, every time I buy eyeglasses for cheap on the internet because of that one Adam Ruins Everything episode. So I rarely say that, but thank you for that.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've gotten a lot of, a lot of, that one has stuck with a lot of people. Yeah.

• 3:22Rachel Feltman?

  Well, let's dive right in. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear 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. Except, there's not a winner anymore. I decided that just didn't amuse me anymore. So we don't do that part. Lauren, welcome back. It's been a minute. Always lovely to have you.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Thank you, Rachel. It's so good to be here. It's great to have a break from being a park ranger, to be on my computer instead.

• 4:03Rachel Feltman?

  Every once in a while, I remember that you're a park ranger now, and I think, God, I hope she's having a beautiful life.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  You know, every once in a while, when you're out there in nature, you think, I gotta touch keyboard.

• 4:14Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, you just miss it. You miss the stale smells of your own office. Touch so much grass that I long to touch keyboard. That's my goal. Well, Lauren, what's your tease today?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  My tease today, Rachel, is that for Charles Dickens, human spontaneous combustion was fact, not fiction. Was he right? Tease in the form of a question.

• 4:36Rachel Feltman?

  I, so I can't wait to hear about this because spontaneous combustion was definitely one of those things that I saw really dubious TV documentaries about when I was a kid. And I was just the right age. When I was like 11, I, I was like, smart enough to be a vacuum and sponge for information, but didn't quite realize yet that people could just make stuff up. So I would be like, my God, I'm learning so much about the mysteries of spontaneous combustion here on the History Channel. So anyway, that, I feel like deep in the cobwebbed corners of my mind, there's a lot of lingering questions about that whole pseudo-scientific

• 5:21Rachel Feltman?

  debate. And I.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think, I think you're not alone in that.

• 5:27Rachel Feltman?

  Adam, what's your tease today?

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Uh, my tease, I, I found an interesting fact that, uh, 20% of men report faking their orgasms. And I found this really surprising. It led me down a rabbit hole of other stats about what, what, because you never hear about this. One out of five of my friends is fake. And it led me down a whole rabbit hole of, of men and sex and what we're not talking about. So that's my tease.

• 5:54Rachel Feltman?

  My tease, I already forgot what it is. Okay. My tease is that, oh, wow, this is why I couldn't remember it, because I wrote something stupid. Okay, my tease is that taking a nap with a couple of giant balls in your hands could solve all your problems.

• 6:13Rachel Feltman?

  That is what I wrote, and it is technically true.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  How big are you talking? Like giant in what?

• 6:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wait, we were just talking about orga, male orgasm. So I'm a little bit, I bet you the image that I had in my head matches what you were thinking.

• 6:27Rachel Feltman?

  Right. No, probably not. I mean, I'll, I'll dive, I keep saying I'll dive it. So I'll go first today. Yeah, the, the size of the balls is not really what's important. In fact, let's rewind a little bit. So according to the internet, a bunch of famously brilliant men have all used this one crazy hack. Doctors hate her. They nap while, they napped while holding something heavy, so that then they would, they would drop it and they would wake up. And the idea here, uh, in this, you know, probably often apocryphal meme, is that they would wake up, they'd be able to write down their brilliant dreams, and they would

• 7:08Rachel Feltman?

  retain that, you know, those creative juices. I'm curious, do either of you have any experience, like, doing the stereotypical thing of like jotting down an idea in the dead of night and reading it in the morning?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  I don't have experience of that necessarily, but I do have the experience of like reading an e-reader in bed on my back.

• 7:26Rachel Feltman?

  Dropping on your face.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, just like hitting myself in the face with it. And when I woke up after that, I did not have any genius ideas to write down. But maybe that's a me problem.

• 7:36Rachel Feltman?

  It's another classic human experience. So when I was in undergrad, I had a friend who was a philosophy major and was working on ideas for his senior thesis. And he had a notepad next to his bed, so he could write down all of his little micro-dream thoughts. And he woke up one night and was like, oh, my God, I, I've thought of the philosophy dissertation that's gonna make my career. He woke up in the morning and what he had written down was cantaloupe.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  So anyway.

• 8:15Rachel Feltman?

  With a K, like K-A-N? Yeah. Emmanuel Cantaloupe.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Emmanuel Cantaloupe. Incredible. Yeah, my middle of the night dreams are not, ideas are not any better than that. It's.

• 8:26Rachel Feltman?

  Right. Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  You don't, the, the stuff you think about in the middle of the night is not really that useful. Other times, shower, yes.

• 8:34Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, shower thoughts.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  In conversation with other people, yes, that's where you come up with great ideas, not while you're asleep.

• 8:39Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  I do, I mean, cantaloupe, that's like a very text-based dream, which is like, my partner also has some really insane text-based dreams. And often, he'll just like wake me up to tell me that he had some harrowing nightmare about a man named Jake with a G, like Gake. So I don't know, I don't know what's going on in men's subconscious. It's all about the mismatched letters.

• 9:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, damn. Well, so you'll see this sort of, this, this sort of falling asleep with the. The aim of being woken up very suddenly, you'll see this attributed to Edison, Tesla, DaVinci, Einstein, and Dali. And those are just sort of off the dome, the names that I mentioned a ton. Now, I did try really hard to find primary sources on this, by which I mean, I searched for like, a couple of hours off and on. So this is not exhaustive. But I will say that I did look pretty hard, and the only one I could find was for Dali. So he did definitely do this. His book, Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, one of his magic secrets was basically a micronap that he referred to as slumber with a key.

• 9:47Rachel Feltman?

  So he said, "You must seat yourself in a bony armchair, preferably of Spanish style." I don't know why. And then you were supposed to hold on to a heavy key in one hand and hold it over a plate. So then, you let yourself, he said, "be progressively invaded by a serene afternoon's sleep, like the spiritual dropped of edith in your soul, rising in the cube of sugar in your body." What a guy. Anyway, he dripped it off. The key would fall out of his fingers, hit the plate, go clang, he would wake up. And he said, "In this brief moment spent between wake and sleep, you would feel revived physically, psychically."

• 10:27Speaker 03

  This sounds great.

• 10:29Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. And he said, "It's gotta be like, less than a minute of sleep. A second could be too long. This has to be so fast." Now, people love talking about how all those other men I mentioned, like Einstein, and especially Edison, this comes up again and again with Edison. People love to say that he also did this, that he would hold a steel ball, or two steel balls, depending on the story, and sit up. And as he fell asleep, you know, his muscle tone would relax, and he would drop the balls, and he would wake up. Did Edison actually do this? I could not find a good source on it. And I think it's worth pointing out that Edison's whole thing was basically to convince other people

• 11:09Rachel Feltman?

  he was a genius, and to then make money off of patents from work that other people did. So this kind of sounds like the kind of thing that he would claim to have done, because it made him sound smart. But, you know, separate from how I think Edison was, you know, kind of a jerk, we do now have evidence to back this practice up.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 11:33Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. So, taking a step back to talk about falling asleep, while we often don't remember it, there's this transitional period when you fall asleep. And you kind of start dreaming before you're asleep, in the truest sense of the word. It lasts just a minute or two, your muscles relax, you'll often have dreamlike visions or thoughts. This is called hypnagogia, or hypnagogia. It's usually coming from recent experiences you've had. In fact, there's this thing called the Tetris effect, where-

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Oh, I know the Tetris effect.

• 12:06Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Oh, it's happened to me.

• 12:09Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. So you spend a lot of time and effort focused on one thing, especially a visual thing. It can dominate these, these sort of, you know, illusory images and sensations that you have during this transition sleep period. And in fact, research shows that this, the Tetris, in the Tetris effect, this worked even on people who had such severe memory loss, that they could play Tetris with researchers, but then have no conscious memory of having played Tetris. By the time they went to sleep, they would still be like, "I keep seeing these rotating blocks." So, yeah. And that kind of gets at, starts to get at what is so fascinating, and kind of a spooky mystical way about this period, because it is sort of the bridge between our conscious and unconscious minds. You

• 12:52Rachel Feltman?

  know, you're, you're still very susceptible to the outside influence of the physical space you're in. So, you know, if, if you're hearing people talk, or you've just been looking at something, you know, those things are even more likely to be present in these sort of early dreams. But you are starting to dream. And scientists now often refer to this as N1 sleep. It's the lightest phase of non-REM sleep. And we do know that people awoken from N1 sleep will often insist that they were awake. This happens all the time when my partner will start snoring, and I'll be like, "Hey, you're snoring." And he's like, "I literally wasn't asleep yet." And I'm like, "Well, let the record show."

• 13:38Speaker 03

  This happens, this happens to me all the time, because it's like, you're lying there, and then the first, the first phase of sleep is you just go, "Ah," like, just once. But you don't hear yourself doing it.

• 13:50Rachel Feltman?

  Yep.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  But you also don't notice you fell asleep. The person's like, "Yeah, you snored." You're like, "No, I was, I was reading my book."

• 13:55Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  So wait, question then. If, if this entire thing is about waking yourself up by dropping a loud object, what happens if your snoring is so loud as to in that first moment immediately wake you up? Does that achieve the same thing?

• 14:10Rachel Feltman?

  So that has happened to me before. I don't, because, I don't think it's that my snoring is so loud exactly, but this is such a specific situation. But sometimes I'll be getting a facial, and I will start to fall asleep. And I'll be so self-conscious about the fact that I made a little snoring sound in front of this esthetician, that it will wake me up. And now I'm like, maybe I should be doing that more often, so that I can have some brilliant, maybe I need, maybe I need to have brilliant facial thoughts.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  You gotta bring your notebook to the esthetician.

• 14:46Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly, exactly. And yeah, so we know that this period is almost always forgotten, to such, to such an extent that you will not, you will insist that you were not asleep. There will be no missing time in your brain. But we know that, again, these hallucinations happen. I used to actually have hypnagogic hallucinations when I was a kid, that actually like, really freaked me out. But it's super common. You can hear stuff, you can see stuff, you can feel stuff. I mean, very common to that sensation of falling, or, you know, like, you're gonna shoot out of bed, or, or like, there's a presence in the room, that

• 15:26Rachel Feltman?

  whole classic sleep paralysis thing. But, yeah, really common to have these sort of brief dreams. And in some studies where people have been prompted to recall these sort of micro dreams, it's been shown that you can pack a ton of elaborate imagery into just a second of sleep. So even though this is a really brief window, and we almost always forget it, a lot happens. Your brain really just pops off.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  I've, I've always had a lot of, I know what you're talking about. Like, I have had ideas at this moment that I feel like have left my grasp. I also, this is a long time ago in my life, but it reminds me of when I was in college, and I was taking amphetamines for ADD. I no longer take them. But they were keeping me up at night, and I went to the doctor, and I said, you know, "What, what can you give me?" And they gave me a form of Ambien, or an Ambien-like pill. It was that class of drug, which are called hypnotics. And my experience of those drugs was that they would put me into that state right before you fall asleep, and I would have that free association. The problem that I had was, they did not counteract the physical wakefulness properties that the Adderall

• 16:34Speaker 03

  gave me. So instead, I would just, I would just stay up and trip balls every night, for like, a month on end. And I would, I would just like, like, free associate and have a lot of really wild ideas, and not sleep. And I did that for a month, and I was like, "Well, I can never take these again." That was a good time, but, you know, it's not, not good for me. So I found that to be a very interesting state of, it is a really interesting sort of mental state to be in.

• 16:57Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  That's different from any other mental, you know, psychological state that you're, that you're really ever in.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fascinating. I recently learned from a friend who suffers from, oh my god, what is the narcolepsy? He suffers from narcolepsy, that apparently narcolepsy is like, your brain just stays in REM. You just experience the same brainwaves as someone does in REM, but like, all the time, which seems similarly. Like, I have questions about how that's possible, and what that's like.

• 17:25Rachel Feltman?

  Well, okay. So I actually am gonna talk about narcolepsy in a second, so I'm glad you brought that up.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 17:30Rachel Feltman?

  No, no, no. Well, and I will also say, I recently, it was really just like, after, after having a kid, when I was like, particularly sleep deprived, I started to notice more when I would be like, laying down-

• 17:46Rachel Feltman?

  Trying to have a nap, I would be just like, my mind would be wandering. But then suddenly it would wander to a place and like some phrase would pop into my head. And I'd be like, what the that that wasn't a conscious thought at all. That was like, that required like five levels of disassociation from reality. So anyway, yes, brains are crazy. It's a weird window between sleep and wake. And yes, scientists have gotten interested in whether the sort of free wandering minds we have in N one sleep really could foster creativity or help with problem solving. The way that, you know, in these, these stories about Dali and, you know, perhaps also Edison and Einstein would suggest.

• 18:26Rachel Feltman?

  So one study did find that people with narcolepsy have increased creative potential. There was this sort of like anecdotal that narcoleptics were more creative than the general population. And then, you know, this, some researchers had this hunch that that could really be the case and could have to do with just sort of how much time they spend in this sort of hybrid state between sleeping and waking. So researchers did recruit a bunch of narcolepsy patients and control patients. And then they gave them a bunch of like surveys and quizzes on creativity and gave them a bunch of prompts to test creativity. One example was they would give them a verbal or visual prompt and just be like, come up

• 19:09Rachel Feltman?

  with as many ideas for this as possible, you know, invent endings to this story. We're going to give you this one shape. How many like drawings can you come up with? And it turned out that narcoleptics really did score higher on all measures of creativity that they used, even though many of them, it was not like part of their professional or personal identity. It's not like they were, they were all artists or something. They just all apparently had this sort of baseline, high creativity. And, you know, one of the, the thought series that it could be because they have more access to this, this kind of like waking dream state.

• 19:53Rachel Feltman?

  So some of these same researchers took recently like a hundred people and they, they gave them this math test and I'm not getting into the details of the math test. Basically it was like a very tricky math problem, but then there was sort of a lateral thinking solution that, that made it possible to solve much more quickly. If you recognize this, this specific pattern and they weren't told, oh, there's an, there's an easy trick to this if you can figure it out. So that was why it was considered a test of creativity. Right? Cause you could just sort of brute force these math problems or, you know, you could

• 20:32Rachel Feltman?

  get the idea that maybe there was a hack to it and you could spot this pattern and, you know, figure out the faster way to solve them. So they took people who didn't find that trick after 30 rounds of these little math questions. And then they gave them a 20 minute break. They sat in a dark room with their eyes closed, very nice. They sat in a chair. They had their hands on the armrest and then they were in their right hand, they were holding a plastic bottle. And of course, all their brainwaves were being monitored so that researchers were able to tell if they were falling asleep, when they fell asleep. And then of course they would drop the bottle if they did fall asleep. Now, they also asked them sort of like, hey, what, what were you just dreaming about when you napped?

• 21:17Rachel Feltman?

  And of course it was all over the place. A lot of people saw numbers and geometrical shapes. One guy was like, I saw a horse in the hospital and someone said there was a man.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Like the John Mulaney joke?

• 21:29Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, that's right. Was John Mulaney in this study? Possibly. Or had somebody just watched the John Mulaney special and then gone to this study. But yeah, there was a horse in the hospital. Somebody saw a man doing the same experiment who was much older and had a kind of plastic helmet on his face. One person said they had the feeling of being at the water's edge, a temperate forest in summer. So all over the place. And what was interesting was that there was no connection between what people were dreaming about and how well they did. The people who were dreaming about numbers didn't do better. But people who napped and then were interrupted, so who actually woke up during that N one

• 22:10Rachel Feltman?

  phase of sleep, were three times better at finding that trick in the problem after their nap than people who stayed awake the whole time. And this was even if they spent just 15 seconds in N one, but it didn't work if they continued to sleep and reach later stages of sleep. So there did seem to be something special about waking up during N one. Another important caveat is that it's not like they had some eureka moment when they woke up. They weren't like, oh, I was thinking about the math problem and now here's the solution. They still had to do a bunch of trials of the math test after.

• 22:49Rachel Feltman?

  It's just that ultimately they did find the trick more often, having come out of this weird little power nap in N one sleep. So we don't know exactly why that works. But researchers, you know, suspect that it has something to do with just sort of, you know, the interface it allows between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind that, you know, it sort of loosens up thinking patterns without like totally pulling you into unconsciousness. And one thing that's cool is that there is a company out of MIT's media lab trying to

• 23:30Rachel Feltman?

  help people harness this and use it to study sort of the purposes of dreaming and states of consciousness in general. Cause again, this, this sort of in between phase is very interesting to researchers, not just because, oh, maybe it can help you be creative, but because it's, is this sort of a, our like gateway into having more communication with our unconscious mind in a way. The company's called Dormio and basically they have these sensors that people wear on their hands to track all these, you know, these biosigns and keep track of the sleep phase you're in. And then when you're partway through N one, your own voice gives you an auditory prompt.

• 24:10Rachel Feltman?

  I think in some cases, it's literally just telling you to write down or talk about what you've been dreaming about. So, you know, there is that aspect of recording your potentially brilliant, but probably pretty asinine ideas. But more importantly, you know, based on this research, you wake up just enough to keep from slipping into N two sleep so that then you can continue the N one sleep for longer. They're also experimenting with having people hear certain trigger words when they're woken up so that then they focus on those topics in their next little bout of N one mind wandering, you know, similar to the Tetris effect we talked about. Now, if people are listening to this and they really want to do this, I did read one interview with one of those researchers where he said, you don't necessarily need to be

• 24:55Rachel Feltman?

  able to perfectly track your sleep phase. They've had interesting results with just asking people how long it takes them to fall asleep and then adding a couple of minutes to that and having a prompt play. So theoretically you could totally set this up yourself. The key would be making it automatic enough that you don't wake up too much. So like, don't look at your phone, then you'll just be awake. But if you want to try to extend your, your N one sleep time, you know, you, you could do it. And apparently you could also just hold a heavy key over a plate if you want to be like Dali or, or a couple of steel balls. Yeah, I think sleep is so weird and spooky in a way that I appreciate.

• 25:35Rachel Feltman?

  And I'm going to be, I'm going to be thinking about how to, how to tap into my, my N one brainwaves a lot, so.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, can I share what I, what I like about this is, you know, guys like Dali. Okay. So, you know, I was a philosophy major and I read a lot of guys like William James and, and, you know, that sort of 19th century, early 20th century philosopher. And there was a lot of, a lot of psychology at the time was people just being like, whoa, what's it like to think? Like, I'm just going to think about thinking. Oh, when I fall asleep, I notice I'm in this state, right? Like that, that's, that's the tradition that Dali was working in. It's like, oh, hold a key and have it hit a thing and you'll notice that blah, blah, blah. And now we do psychology very differently, right? It's all experimental and brain scans and stuff like that. And it's, it's very validating to hear this experimental confirmation of the stuff that, you know, people like Dali and William James are figuring out just by sort of sitting around

• 26:29Speaker 03

  and examining what it's like to be a conscious being, you know? Everything you just said, Dali would be like, yeah, I know that. I did it. Oh, wow. You had 20 other people do it and then they did it to, yeah, I know. I, I told you this. And of course you want to experimentally confirm things, but I think that's, I think that's really great. It also reminds me of one of my favorite little mini facts, and I don't remember where I read this and I don't have the, the study confirmation, but you could, you could look it up if you, if you don't believe me, which is that I've, something I've always found useful. Is there's the idea that your brain is sort of processing problems or ideas in the background when you're alive, when you're just around thinking. And the reason I mentioned showers earlier

• 27:12Speaker 03

  is your brain will often work on a problem while you're engaged in sort of a repetitive, non-thinking involved task, a classic one being in the shower. And so the reason people have ideas in the shower is a natural part of psychology. You're, you're, you know, you're, you're folk, you're, you're, you're washing your hair. You're not doing anything else. You're not doing anything else engaging your brain. Your mind just sort of wanders and often you'll come up with a solution to the problem. And that reminds me of this state that you're in, right? It's a moment where you're phenomenologically, your ideas are sort of recombining or you're free associating with, in a goalless way.

• 27:49Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Is often where the ideas come. And the best extra part of this that I ever heard is problems often get solved in this part of the brain. The other thing that often happens though, is if you're having a social conflict with somebody, if you're in a fight with someone, or if you're mad at somebody, or if you're, you know, you got an upsetting email that you have to reply to, that'll occupy the same spot in your brain. You'll notice that when you're taking a shower.

• 28:15Rachel Feltman?

  Is that why I practice arguments in the shower?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yes. It's the same, it's the same whatever, I don't know what it's called, working space.

• 28:23Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  And, and so the tip, I read on somebody's blog, I read this like 10 years ago. They were like, if you want to be more creative, try to minimize the amount of time you spend on social conflicts. And I've always thought that was a great advice, that like a lot of, a lot of wasted brain space on just, oh, she's mad at me. What do I say? You know? Solve the problem, you know, but, but try not to dwell. Some people love the drama, right?

• 28:47Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  And if you love the drama too much, you're not going to have any good ideas about anything else. Um, so ration out your shower space and make sure you're using it well. And I think you're falling asleep space now too as well. I'd add to that.

• 28:59Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Or I guess, I mean, you could revel in the drama and just try and use those steel balls to like relive your greatest comebacks over and over again.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. I love that.

• 29:12Rachel Feltman?

  Okay. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 29:20Rachel Feltman?

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• 30:05Rachel Feltman?

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• 31:50Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. Lauren, why don't we talk about some spontaneous combustion, please?

• 31:55Speaker 02

  I would love to. Yeah. So we're going to start with kind of a big chunk of history, but we'll get, we'll get to the science, I promise. And so we're going to start with some literary history. In the novel Bleak House, which was written and published serially by Charles Dickens between March 1852 and September 1853, his really aptly named unscrupulous character Crook dies suddenly and mysteriously, leaving behind a quote, "suffocating vapor in the room and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceilings." So Crook, by Dickens' pen, was the victim of spontaneous human combustion, incinerated by a fire that, according to Dickens, originated from within his own body and left everything else in the house, the entirely wooden house filled with wooden furniture, unharmed.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  And sure, fine, it's fiction, authors can write whatever they want, you might think. But George Lose, Dickens' frenemy, philosopher, critic at the time, also a quote amateur physiologist at a time when that was a thing. I don't know how you do amateur physiology, but he was doing it. Anyway, Lose did not think that Dickens should be free to write whatever he wanted, whatever he wanted in fiction. And he took great issue with Crook's death because he was worried that Dickens' masses of readers would see this in Bleak House and assume that, you know, it was happening all the time. It was real. People were bursting into flames. So Lose wrote and published a letter to Dickens imploring him to clarify to his audience that spontaneous human combustion isn't real.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Except Dickens, 100% earnestly believed, along with many others at the time, it turned out that it was. He was fervent in his thought that spontaneous human combustion was a possibility for all of the old immoral drunks out there. So that first letter from Lose ignited like very public 10 month long flame war. The pun is intended. It went back and forth. So the novel was published seriously, serially. The novel was published serially. Every time Dickens put out a new installment or a new chapter, it was preceded by this foreword that was like, and here are all of the cases of spontaneous human combustion. Here is all, here are all of the facts. Here is every instance where this has happened.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  He went back to some old French detectives' accounts and kept quoting this one guy Le Cat. He double, tripled, quadrupled down. And instead of just leaving it be and learning the lesson that we've all since learned from comment sections on the internet, Lose kept it going. Every time Lose wrote a new response, he was citing the fancy new science out there about things like the water content of the human body and the circulatory system. I learned while reading about this that scientists didn't understand the lungs at all until the late 1800s. So a lot of people thought for decades that inside our lungs, it was just a literal combustion chamber. Cause they figured out oxygen was like involved in our bodies, that we were taking in oxygen.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  And simultaneously scientists figured out that oxygen was really important in fire. And so they were like, our lungs, they're full of oxygen inside, flames must be happening.

• 34:57Rachel Feltman?

  True.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  So there was a lot of back and forth. It was in like a very public forum. In one of the letters in response to Lose, Dickens cited information about the specific case that inspired his character Crook's death in Bleak House. It was based off of this account of an Italian countess's death as reported by a priest in 1731. I'm going to read a passage of that description to you now. Quote, "Four feet distant from the bed, there was a heap of ashes, two legs untouched from the foot to the knee with their stockings on. Between them was the lady's head, whose brains, half the back part of the skull and the whole chin were burnt to ashes, amongst which were found three fingers blackened. All the rest was ashes, which had this particular quality that they left in the hand

• 35:41Speaker 02

  when taken up a greasy, stinking moisture." Very spooky for Halloween month. I don't know if this is coming out before or after Halloween. But based on that eyewitness account from the priest, the priest came to the only logical conclusion that the fire that consumed the body was quote, "caused in the entrails of the body by inflamed effluvia of her blood, by juices and fermentations in the stomach and by the many combustible matters which are abundant in living bodies."

• 36:12Rachel Feltman?

  So a fire fart, fire belch.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, gases, just kind of, yeah, juice, famously combustible juices.

• 36:20Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this was the account that Dickens read that made him really, truly believe, this is real, my characters can die from it, if real Italian countesses can also die from it. And in Dickens' defense, this is truly so far from the only case of alleged historic spontaneous human, alleged historic spontaneous human combustion. Say that five times fast. People sometimes abbreviate spontaneous human combustion, just SHC, which I would be saying for brevity, but it's actually also really hard to say.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  SHC. So depending on what sources you trust and what Enlightenment era tabloids you read, there were somewhere between a dozen and 200 real deaths chalked up to spontaneous human combustion in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries. Dickens was the first author to really popularize it as a thing that could happen in the zeitgeist through fiction. And much to Lose's, Lose's discontent, other authors really quickly followed suit. So spontaneous human combustion, it shows up in novels by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Nikolai Gogol and Washington Irving. Lose was probably right to be concerned that Dickens was going to start some sort of spontaneous human combustion fervor. He did.

• 37:35Rachel Feltman?

  But like, was this a Streisand effect thing? If he had just left him alone and it had just been this one plot point? That Dickens didn't feel the need to like have a forward about in every installment, you know?

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I truly think Luz brought it on himself. I think if he hadn't written all of these letters and then gotten Dickens to be like, but look at this case and look at this case. Like, I'm sure if I was alive when Bleak House was coming out, chapter by chapter, I would have fully just been there to read the introduction that was like, and here is this actual me giving you a historic account of someone I believe exploded into flames. And then I would throw away the rest of it. I would not care for the novel part of it. Okay, so.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  I tried to read Bleak House a few years ago and I couldn't get past chapter four. So I wasn't cursed with the belief in spontaneous combustion. I stayed safe through my own ADD and inability to finish a book.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Do you remember what the last straw was for you? What got you to put it down?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  I mean, it's kind of, it's about a very complicated court case in a kind of court that doesn't exist anymore. And so it's, yeah, you know, it doesn't, the pacing is very different than what we're used to with a modern novel. And I was, I was biting off more than I could chew. I was being ambitious. You know what I mean?

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it, you know, at the time, wasn't meant to be read in, in one swift sitting was meant to be taken in like a weekly comic book strip, I guess.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the book is sort of like the invention of the book of the, when they put it into a book, that's sort of like when they invented Netflix. They're like, now you're going to binge it all at once. And it's sort of that, that up book publishing the same way Ted Sarandos up television.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Did it really though? Did, was there like a massive, I guess this is, this is maybe a question for off podcast, but was there like a massive shift in like employment prospects and profitability of the novel when it all started getting published at once?

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Great question. Anything similar to television where suddenly they're making, like it changes the way the, the medium is made in a way that impoverishes everybody?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  So it happened in TV. Yeah. Good versus the serialized novel? Great question.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  I guess find TBD, we'll find out later. So back to these real supposed instances of spontaneous human combustion. The stories were basically, like I said, they were pretty tabloidy. They were old school clickbait, but there were some unifying features found across them. Usually the victims were older women. They were often, the writers took extreme pains to make sure they were described as overweight, poor, sickly, in ill health, and almost uniformly, they were big drinkers. And maybe unsurprisingly, tabloid accounts came with a heavy dose of moralizing over the indulgences of contemporary life. So

• 40:24Speaker 02

  they were kind of, they read like a dare campaign against fat ladies growing old, basically. Other similarities in the cases, in every case of reported spontaneous human combustion, there were no witnesses and the lower legs are weirdly often the only part described as remaining fully intact. Greasy residues, char marks are all common, described on the ceiling or the floor. And again, key feature is that the rooms, the houses, the furniture, the surroundings of all of these people who supposedly died this way, remain largely unburned. Almost all of these features were also hallmarks in the mysterious 2010 death of 76 year old Michael Farady in Galway, Ireland, which after some investigation, the

• 41:07Speaker 02

  coroner did in fact attribute to spontaneous combustion. So if Dickens were alive today, he'd have even more ammunition to draw on because accounts of spontaneous combustion aren't all stuck in the distant past. So begs the question, if it happened either dozens or hundreds of times, depending on who you ask back in the day, and also as recently as 2010, was Dickens onto something? Can someone just erupt into flames? Rachel, Adam, do you have thoughts on this? Place your bets now.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, no, it seems to contradict the laws of thermodynamics. I don't think that there's enough stored energy within somebody to, I mean, unless there's, is there like a big capacitor in me somewhere? I don't know about, or?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  It's the lungs. It's the lungs which are full of flames.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Oh, well, and also if you drink too much, your body's full of alcohol, which is flammable, right? I assume that was part of it. You're just, you're just a, I sort of get that where they're like a fat person who's been drinking a lot. First of all, the is, you know, they're moralizing against that in the Victorian era. But second, I could see how they could picture, they, they would think of that as like a bomb of some kind, right? Because if you imagine like fat and alcohol soaked like rags, sound like something that you would like hurl onto a boat in order to, you know, catch it on fire, right? Like it, it does have this image of flammability, if you combine those things in their, in their, in their stupid 19th century minds.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  You heard it here first. Adam Conover, a big proponent of spontaneous.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  No, no, I say, I, I miss, it's intuitively understandable to these idiots.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Who are great at thinking about psychology, but not about flammability.

• 42:49Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I mean, like there were literally lamps made out of fat birds they set on fire.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You'd be like, I take a hunk of whale blubber and then I pour a lot of ethanol on it and that's how I light my house. So if I were to get real fat and drink a lot of, you know, rot gut gin, certainly I could be flammable too. But I don't think it's real.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Rachel, anything to add there?

• 43:12Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. I, sometimes I wish I could spontaneously combust, but I think, I think it's not to be.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Sure. Okay. Well, no spoilers, but both of you may or may not be on the right track. Back to that Italian countess who inspired Dickens, one little detail that's maybe worth mentioning, wasn't just that she drank alcohol, but that she bathed nightly in an extremely flammable solution of camp for in alcohol, which was thought to treat skin conditions at the time. So is it maybe the spontaneous part that is, that, that was getting unnecessarily tacked on to just people being on fire? Yeah, we'll get to that. Okay. So yeah, she, she bathed in basically like full on fire starter. And in her home, as in many homes at the time, there were open flames

• 44:02Speaker 02

  everywhere, a fireplace, candles, lanterns, notably mentioned in the priest's account. In fact, in basically all of the case reports, even the heavily editorialized and exaggerated ones that really hit that moralizing hard and the act of God idea hard, there is usually a fire mentioned somewhere, be it a candelabra or a tobacco pipe. And in the 2010 case of Farady in Ireland, his body was found lying next to a very recently used fireplace. So as you suggested, Rachel, the combustion probably is not happening so spontaneously after all. When I first wrote about this for Popular Sciences, Ask Us Anything, I spoke with Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia,

• 44:44Speaker 02

  who really highlighted the no witnesses fact here that if this was actually happening day in, day out around the world, someone probably would have seen it. He said, quote, "If people could spontaneously burst into flames, you'd be down at Walmart and suddenly the little old lady beside you pushing a trolley would explode." But the question does kind of remain, even if people are not spontaneously bursting into flames, even if there's a source, an ember, a fire, and they are wrapped in blankets that are like errantly also soaked in booze, the question remains like, how could bodies burn so completely? Like bones and trails gone without that fire like spreading to all of the other surroundings?

• 45:26Rachel Feltman?

  Leaving the legs, apparently?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Right. Sometimes leaving the legs. Cremation ovens famously have to be very, very hot to yield the desired outcome of human ash. I have seen the pizza oven, Nathan for you, episode. So how, how could a body and bones burn to dust, but unupholstered wooden chair that the body was sitting in stay intact? This is the part where science comes into play. So if you're on the side of conspiracy, spontaneous human combustion, you might blame, again, an act of God, lightning, static electricity, those intestinal gases that Dickens loved to cite, or even ketosis as recently as 2012. And quote, independent researcher suggested that the acetone buildup in people's breath and body by those in the metabolic state ketosis could trigger spontaneous ignition. That was not demonstrated

• 46:13Speaker 02

  in any way.

• 46:14Rachel Feltman?

  Crossfit gyms would be exploding left and right.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, left and right. People, the paleo diet would not, yeah. I don't, I don't even know where to go with that bit, but you get the idea. More likely than any of those things is this actual thing called the WIC effect. I think both of you described kind of the parallels between a person boozing it up with excess body fat and also the very nature of a candle. So yeah, the victims in all of these instances are most likely akin to human candles. So here's the gist. If you take fatty tissue, if you wrap it in an absorbent material like blankets or clothing, maybe that material is cotton fabric,

• 46:58Speaker 02

  maybe it's wool fabric. In both cases, it is flammable. And then you ignite it with an ember. Fire will burn slowly and persistently, but at a high enough temperature to do some serious damage. So there's been a lot of experiments testing this. There was actually even one conducted on screen in a 1998 BBC science documentary using a pig carcass. A lot of them use pig carcasses. So they took a pig carcass, they wrapped it in blankets, they used.

• 47:26Rachel Feltman?

  A pig in a blanket.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  A pig in a blanket. That's right. And that's where we get our favorite finger food from. Yeah. So they blankets, like a small amount of accelerant, but like just, you know, dribbled on the blankets. And I think they actually also did tests without any accelerant. But in the course of a few hours, burning in this way, most of the pig was gone, except for the comparatively less fatty legs.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. There have been some struggles to replicate this experiment completely, and that's kept the flames of earnest debate alive in some corners of the internet. So like spontaneous human combustion, there are still independent researchers out there who truly believe it's been misrepresented and is possible. But another reason that the pig tests have been difficult to replicate is that they test with pig carcasses, they lack some of the key features that were probably present in instances of people dying this way. One of those things is osteoporosis. So there is, there's this master's thesis online from 2000 authored by a scientist named Angie Christensen, who is fun fact,

• 48:37Speaker 02

  now an FBI forensic anthropologist. But her 2000 master's thesis on spontaneous human combustion and quote, the WIC effect involved work she did at the Knoxville Outdoor Anthropological Research Facility, which I know has come up on this show before, is like famously just called the Body Farm is the place where like all sorts of. Tests and experiments involving human decomposition are happening. But Christensen, she did her master's research on this question of the WIC effect and what was missing from those pig studies. And she was specifically interested in this question of bone density. Because a lot of the times in these attempts to replicate the pig studies are the one outcome of the pig study in which the WIC effect works and the pig's midsection is totally gone.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  No one had really asked, well, why aren't this pig's bones burning? But why might a human bone burn? And notably, many of the victims, again, were elderly. They had probably low bone density. Many of them may have also had osteoporosis, or many of them may have had osteoporosis. So Christensen, she took chunks of human flesh taken from the amputated leg of a 72 year old woman, wrapped them in cotton cloth, set them on fire, first calculated the temperature of ignition and found that it was actually much lower than what it was, than what had previously been reported in a lot of work, including the work using pig carcasses. And she also compared how different segments of bone burned from that same leg segment

• 50:04Speaker 02

  and showed that low-density osteoporitic bone broke down way more completely and quickly than denser, healthier bone at the same temperature. So, which again, could explain why in almost all of these cases, human combustion was happening among the elderly, mostly women, the subpopulation most likely to have very low bone density. So it wasn't just necessarily a question of fat content, but also like how readily the rest of a person's body might be susceptible to flames. Which I guess in describing this now, I'm realizing how kind of gruesome it was. And it was supposed to be, it was supposed to be fun. I, but I do think there's probably a lot of reasons why, why older people, one, I think

• 50:48Speaker 02

  a lot of older people are living alone, less likely to be witnessed and observed. If your friend who you were hanging out with suddenly had a minor fire going on their pant leg, you would probably put it out. A lot of older people may be less likely to do that for themselves. A lot of older people may be more predisposed to falling asleep at inopportune intervals with, without keys in their hands. So, yeah, I guess actually like quite sad and upsetting to think about too deeply. But to be fair, in modern times, reported cases of this death shocked up to spontaneous combustion are, at least I haven't seen one since 2010, so they seem pretty rare.

• 51:24Rachel Feltman?

  Fewer open flames.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Fewer open flames. That's true. And this is why fireplaces, they're out.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  It's funny how these two stories connect, because yeah, if you're an older person who lives alone, you should go to sleep with steel balls in your hand.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  So that you're woken up and you don't, you don't catch on fire from the cigarette that's in your other hand. Put the cigarette out is the more important thing.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  That's right. We're, we're, we're two birds with one heavy key, is what we're doing right here.

• 51:50Rachel Feltman?

  You're also keeping up your bone density. You're lifting, you know, keeping the mind sharp.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  It's funny how, how strange the body reacts to things. Like another favorite one of mine is that there are like certain religious leaders who like in certain sects where it's like, oh, this, he died and it was a miracle because he became a mummy. Have you heard of this story?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  And it's, and it's just like a thing that can happen if someone is the right size and has the right, I don't know, combination of surface area and the climate is right, their body will self-mummify rather than rot, right?

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Like bog body style?

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the case in which this came up for me recently is cases in, I just had a expert named Saul Justin Newman on my podcast about talking about how longevity science is bullshit. And one of the reasons, blue zones are bullshit, right? The idea, places where people live extra long, over a hundred.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Right. It's like, it's a accounting error, right?

• 52:51Speaker 03

  It's an accounting error. It's where people have, it's, it's actually places where they have poor birth records and where there's high rates of pension fraud.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  So there are places, and basically the, the story is they would go in Okinawa to try to find the 115 year old person, who's the oldest person in Okinawa. And it's actually, they go in and it's a mummified corpse that's been in the bedroom for 30 years and the family has just been collecting pension payments, right? And in some of these cases, it'll just be, yeah, just, oh, this, they're, they're in their bed and they have self-mummified, they've dried out, right? And so spontaneous combustion ends up to me looking like an opposite version of that, where yeah, sometimes seems kind of crazy, but you can catch on fire. But with you, if you have a spark, it's not spontaneous. That, that turns out to be the only false part about, false part of it is the spontaneousness of it.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, human combustion can still happen, which I feel like we all already knew, right? That like you could in fact die from burning. Famous examples come to mind, but yeah, like the spontaneous issue is the, the part that is scientifically under scrutiny here.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  Okay, well, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York. Or, why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse? We also solve non-car related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Okay, we're back. And Adam, what have you brought for us today?

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Well, you'll, again, this will take us right down a rabbit hole. I've been very interested recently in male sexuality, especially straight male sexuality, or men who identify as straight sexuality, as this sort of like vast, unexamined field of human behavior, right? I feel like, I have a line in my new standup special where I, I say that I think straight men are the most sexually repressed people in America. And I get a lot of eyebrows raised when I say that. But I really, I really believe it. And the fact that brought me to that, that I read recently, is that around 20 to 25% of men would ask, you know, in a formal sexological survey, report having faked orgasm at least

• 55:33Speaker 03

  once in their lives. And this seems to be surprising because we have this sort of social dialogue about women faking orgasms, right? As being a common, and it is more common, it's something more like 60 to 80% of women report faking orgasms. But the idea that men would fake orgasms is like, it, it comes as more surprising, right? It's a little bit more bad. Wait, really? Would they, would they have to? And once you sort of open that door and ask why, it leads you down this path of all of these pressures that men place on themselves sexually without ever acknowledging it. You know, the, the, you know, just the idea that, you know, men feel that, the amount

• 56:16Speaker 03

  of performance anxiety, the amount of like, I must perform in this situation. If I don't, there's something wrong with me, right? It's a different sort of pressure, but it's, it's far less like something that we actually speak about. There's, there's so many examples of men misunderstanding their own sexualities in this way. For instance, it's been shown that men in long-term relationships systematically underperceive their partner's desire, that they, they like assume that their partner isn't interested in them sexually, but they have like a, and that's, that's in contrast to, men in the world will, will tend to over perceive sexual desire on the part of a woman who they're just like meeting in public, right? What you could, you know what I'm talking about? Oh, she's coming on to me, but she's not really, right?

• 57:00Speaker 02

  She's just being like baseline polite.

• 57:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Oh, she's flirting with me, right? That's, that is true. And that, that's like a social reality that has been shown experimentally. But the opposite has been shown for people in long-term relationships, that men are like, ah, she doesn't, she doesn't want to bang me. She's not interested. She has a headache or whatever. No, actually, they're underperceiving their partner's desire. A study found, there's an old canard that, you know, men are, most of their sexual prime around the age of 18, and that women become sexually more active around their, the 30s or 40s. Have you heard this? This is sort of a bit of pop, pop psychology. A 2026 study found that men's desire actually peaks around age 40 in exactly the same way. That's what new, you know, the, the idea of a teenage rocket that fizzles out is, turns

• 57:48Speaker 03

  out to not be that true. And the, the last piece of this, the part that connects, I think, the most to, Uh, the, the faked orgasm idea is that men, when it's actually researched, report wanting more emotional intimacy, but not being able to express it. Boys as young as eighth grade report tension between wanting emotional intimacy and pressure to like stay detached, right? And so, you know, we have this, what I find interesting is, and what I sort of am trying to unpack in my standup right now, is that I feel like in our cultural conversation about sex, we have all of these ideas of, you know, our sexual narrative around women is A, but actually the truth is B, right?

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Because we've done this sort of examination culturally and dug into these things. We have not done so for men. There's so many assumptions that men have about themselves that have, you know, we have not dug into. And for that reason, and there's also a lot of experimental findings about men talk about sex less, men think about, actually think about sex less. You'll think about, oh, men think about sex every seven seconds. Well, sure, maybe in some blunt way, but you know, it's, it's something that we don't examine about ourselves. And it leads to a lot of bad, bad outcomes, you know? Uh, sexual assault among men is 90% go completely unreported. Um, something like 40% of men with erectile dysfunction never discuss it with their doctor. Now, maybe they're getting, you know, they're doing telehealth or something to get, to

• 59:16Speaker 03

  get their prescription nowadays, but like, they don't even, they don't even bring it up. Only 12% of men in college report receiving any kind of conversation with other men about sex in a meaningfully intimate way, right? Wow, yeah. And so it's just like, there's this like surface level belief that we have as men as these very sexualized, you know, sex, sex, sex focused creatures, right? When in reality, it's actually something that we don't examine at all. We don't talk about, we don't think about, you know, in, in terms of how it actually affects us, you know? And I, I find that really fascinating. And that is one of the things I'm trying to explore in my standup right now, you know?

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Like I was talking with some other comedians about male, and I was in a mixed group of men, male and female people in comedy. And I was like, yeah, men don't ever talk about their sex lives in, in standup comedy. And one of the women goes, oh, no, yes, they do. They're always doing, you know, rude sex jokes. I'm like, yeah, men will do jokes, male standup comedians will do jokes about the concept of sex, right? About like, hey, boys, you know, when, you know, when this happened, you know what you do, right? Like that.

• 1:00:23Rachel Feltman?

  Uh, you don't get like the confessional, like.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:00:26Rachel Feltman?

  You have like, boys, this ever happened to you?

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, even that, maybe this ever happened to you, but we will not get, um, let me tell you what happened to me two weeks ago, right? Let me, I was with, you know, I, I, I was with this one woman and she made me feel like this, and here's how I responded to it, right? And that, once I started looking for it, turned out to be a real, I found a real dearth of that kind of examination in our entire cultural sphere, right? Like for instance, I started looking in fiction or nonfiction, you could find so many memoirs by women and gay men where they, or, or queer men, or queer people, where they examine their sex lives, right? Here's my first memory of feeling arousal. Here's something that happened to me when I was 15, that was formative.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  Here's et cetera, right? Here's the evolution I went through. Straight men almost never write books that have this theme, right? Or it's much rarer currently. And I, this to me is such an interesting thing to dive into, and it's something that I'm trying to explore in, in a lot of different parts of my, my work right now. But what I was interested in is how much the experimental data or the, the, you know, survey data, uh, bears this out. Uh, that everywhere you look, we're just not, you know, peeking under the covers at all.

• 1:01:43Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. No, I think it's really interesting, you know, it comes up a lot, you know, on this show and in, in general, that, uh, there's so, so much historically in science and social science, and even just the conversation around human behavior has treated men, and specifically white European straight men, as this default. And I think, you know, one of the, one of the really interesting and kind of complicated ways that that has, has hurt us as a society is that I think it, it does mean that people who are not that default have had more of an impetus and, you know, a, a prompting to

• 1:02:26Rachel Feltman?

  subvert, you know, to come out and be like, let's talk about like, what is female sexuality? What is queer sexuality? Because it's not this thing. And then meanwhile, it's actually also doing a disservice to most men, because the very idea of there being some, you know, normal proto-human that is the model and everything else is other, is, is totally false. But, you know, men all just get to be grouped up in the, uh, yeah, men, sex is for men and by men. It's what men do. There's not much more for us to understand. It is a really interesting problem.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's like, so men, especially straight white men, right, have dominated the field of human inquiry for so long, right? That other people's issues become, they're seen as the default, and then other people excluded. And so we have made a concerted effort, to some degree, not as much as we need to, to examine, you know, other people's, what is different about women? What is different about queer people, right? What is, what is their authentic experience? And what we have not done is then gone back to the straight men and said, okay, what is weird about them? You know? What about them does not match the default, right? Because the default is also not true about men, right?

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Right. I think kind of like what, with, what with Rachel was saying, it, a byproduct of the patriarchy seems to be that if you are in a marginalized group and you're already doing something baseline with your sexuality, that like the, you know, is, is aberrant from, seen from the perspective of like, the, the white male het baseline, then, um, it's maybe even easier to a degree to talk about your personal experience, because like, just the, your mere existence is, uh, is like a violation of something. So if you're going to add to that, if you're going to make it more specific, or even like more niche, then why not? But if you have this expectation of yourself that you should be fitting the mold and that, you know, on surface level, I guess you do fit the mold, then maybe even examining or

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  admitting to yourself the ways that you don't becomes, you know, it's, it's more of a trap, maybe.

• 1:04:33Rachel Feltman?

  And even just in internally, you know, what you're able to imagine is, is possible for you. I mean, I, I wrote a book about the history of sex and I remember, um, briefly talking about, you know, some various queer subcultures, you know, I, I had like a brief thing about how like motorcycle clubs, you know, were, were a big thing for gay men and how that, you know, evolved into leather culture as we know it today. And I made the point that like, they were shut out from what was supposed to be the normal stuff people were supposed to want to do. That wasn't accessible to them. So it did mean they had to decide what they wanted to do with their time and what they wanted their lives to look like.

• 1:05:18Rachel Feltman?

  And I think it is so important that people have opportunities to sort of like have these expansive thoughts about what could be true for them. And I think for, again, because there is this like idea of what masculinity is, you know, especially for men who identify as straight, that people like just don't, it doesn't occur to them.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, uh, because we don't have the initial shove, right? Because straight men are the default and we just sort of remain in that because it's so socially easy, right? But as Lauren says, once you're already not the default, it's when you're adding to the specificity, you, you know, I, I, the best example of this, I think, is, you know, women report identifying as being bisexual twice as often as men, right? And it's different depending on the cohort, right? Gen Z is 31% of women identify as bisexual. Men is 12%. It's less than half the rate. And it's, it'll be, you know, it's, it's around lesser, more than half to some degree across different cohorts. I have trouble believing that's the case, right?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  That there's some, if there's some biological, you know, root for, uh, homosexuality or, or bisexuality. I have trouble believing that, oh, it just shows up in women more. I think it's clearly a matter of not just reporting, but investigation. And I've seen so many, I've seen so many accounts by women, women standup comedians, essayists, right? People realizing, oh, maybe I'm bisexual late in life, you know? Oh, I'm 43 and I'm realizing, oh, wait, I did have this experience when I was 14 years old. And I was always told that this was what my sexuality was. It took me a long time to, you're at this, this sort of slow process of examination. And that script is now out there, right? If you start to have those feelings, you can go find that standup comedian, find that

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  essayist, find that whatever person who's, who's told that story, doesn't exist as much for men, right? Um, that sort of basic examination. And so I started, and, and a lot of what my, my, my special is about is I started feeling, I'm now in my early 40s, and I started going, why am I feeling jealous of my out queer friends, right? What is it? And I'm like, oh, the, the big shove out of normative society, right? Which is very painful and difficult and not something that I would wish on anybody. But the thing of like, okay, you're, you're so different, right? Enables folks to say, okay, who am I? And who am I actually? And how do I want to build my life, right? And once someone has done that, it's very centering. It's a wonderful thing, right?

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  My, all my trans friends who have said, you know what? I'm not the person that you think I am. I know who I am. I'm going to be that person, right? That, that's a wonderful, a person who's gone through that, that's a, that's a, that's a strength and a centeredness, right? And, and straight guys or men who grow up as straight or identify as straight are not, never have that moment of, guess what? You're out of the boat and you got to figure out who you are, right? And so we never look into, wait, who am I? How, how do I differ from who I'm told that I am? We just sort of accept it. And, and I think that sort of cultural thing is what leads to all of these discrepancies that you see. And I want to be really clear, a lot of times when, you know, we had these conversations

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  about how patriarchy hurts men, you know, you have people say, well, it hurts women or queer people more. And yes, it does. But the ways in which it hurts men, we talk about less and those have bad effects, not just on men, but on everybody else. Because men being ignorant about this stuff causes them to, to cause more pain on other people. Um, and so just like a stat, like 20% of men fake orgasm, even though more women fake orgasm, the fact that we don't talk about the fact that one in five men are faking orgasm, I'm like, that is, that is like a really interesting entry point into this whole conversation. If we're not, if we're not talking about that, what else are we not talking about?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Well, and I'm just imagining, so the conversations around women faked orgasms, if you look in, you know, like sitcoms, popular media or whatever, it's often a man is informed that a woman has faked an orgasm and there's like this whole host of denials and like, couldn't have been, you know, wow, I was so good in bed. But I'm imagining what it would be like if a woman were to find out a man faked an orgasm. And the thing I'm coming to is not that the woman would be like, it couldn't have been, I was so good in bed. It would be like this, well, it couldn't have been. He had an erection, it went away, like, all of the normal things happen. It would be like a type of gaslighting that is picking apart a man's actual like physical reactions and presentation in a way that I think would probably be like,

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  pretty upsetting. I don't know. It's like, because you said that and my first reaction was like, well, how? And it's like, maybe that's not actually the key question here.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  I mean, I, you know, I don't want to get too anatomical, but you know, sometimes you're like, I'm running out of steam. You know what I mean? Things are like, all right, things were going great, but I'm, I'm feeling some fatigue. And I feel anxious, maybe someone goes, I feel anxious about that. I don't want to report that I'm a little under aroused right now, right? And so, you know, you, you put on a little show and you're like, okay, I'm all done, right? You're like, oh, that was so great, when actually, you know, and a lot of, you know, even in hetero context, like a lot of times a male orgasm is treated by both people as being the big finale everybody's waiting for, right? And that's a lot of, that's a lot of pressure, right?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's so in our, you know, I, I think, I think the big difference is when you hear about a woman doing it, it's, I'm just, I was just trying to get out of there. I was just gonna let him know he did a good job and we can move on. You know what I mean? When a man fakes it, I think it's more out of fear of letting oneself down, right? Or letting one, like, a lack of performance that reflects poorly on you. And I think that's a harder thing to share and talk about, right? But yeah, I mean, a lot of, a lot of weird stuff goes on with straight guys that we don't really, that we don't really talk about, you know? It's, the, the male sexuality is also a complicated and difficult thing, you know?

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  And we treat it as being very simple and very obvious. And oh yeah, you can tell when a man is horny and you can tell when a man has finished and you can tell it's so obvious. Well, actually, it's, there's a lot of variability, right? And there's a lot of confusion. I mean, I think a lot of men have trouble even identifying, like, when they are not aroused in a situation, right? I think a lot of, when I examine my own experience, a lot of cases of erectile dysfunction. Oh boy, oh man, something's going along with me, going wrong with me physiologically because I should be so ready to go at every moment, therefore I need a pill, right? Well, hey man, maybe you just weren't into it. You know what I mean?

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Maybe you were anxious. Maybe the person you were with made you feel uncomfortable, right? Maybe you didn't like the situation. Maybe you were not, right?

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Maybe you were tired, maybe you had a headache.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Maybe, maybe the person came on too strong, right? Maybe you felt frightened. There are, there are experiences I go back and look at and go, oh, that was what was actually going on with me. But I, but it was, but I couldn't acknowledge it in the moment. I felt, no, no, no, I have to, you know, I put pressure on myself because of my expectations of what male sexuality should be. Men, straight men especially, have not gone through this sort of interrogation of our experiences, right? We didn't have consciousness raising groups, right, in the 60s? And if we had, I think we would have learned a lot about ourselves. And I, I think that, you know, we're just, we're just so far behind on the cultural conversation. And what's fascinating to me is it shows up in statistics when you look at what, you know,

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  sexologists and sociologists find when they survey people, is all this, all this stuff put together says, oh yeah, men do not know ourselves. And I think we need to, I think we need to start. And that's what my stand-up special is about, is about me trying to, me trying to do that for myself and realizing it's a broader problem.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, awesome. I guess you know, you know, you've got a flawed culture when introspection and self-reflection become feminine traits.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. And, you know, there's, it's so funny to me that there's this often response, you know, the male loneliness epidemic, right, is a frequent conversation. And you hear people go like, oh, now we have to help the men not be lonely, right? Oh boy, well, men's problems get all the attention. And I, the way I look at it is, you know, women as a group have gone through such a better, does such a better job of interrogating this stuff. It's no woman or gay person or persons of color's responsibility to train up any particular man and help them out. But, but we do as a culture, like, need to help out the straight guys and help them raise their consciousnesses a little bit. Like, I think people who are,

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  have put some thought into this stuff, you know, bring, bring us into it. Does that make sense?

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  We gotta start the conversation somewhere.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  It sounds like you're taking it on as your responsibility.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  I am a little bit. I'm, I'm the one enlightened, straitish man in America. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to start the conversation a little bit in my work. Men do need to do it for ourselves. And, and I think what we need to do is learn from the, the women and queer people who have, who have gone ahead of us.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Well, I'm definitely looking forward to, yeah, yes, Lauren, yes, snaps and claps.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you, thank you.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  I am definitely looking forward to checking out your special. And thanks for coming on the show. It's been great having you.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful being here. And I was so thrilled to learn your weird facts.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:14:59Rachel Feltman?

  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.