Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week REVISITING Naked Founding Fathers, Jalapeño Thumb, Counting Vampires About this episode In our final rerun episode during Rachel's parental leave, we have the oldest episode yet. It features one of Jess' first appearances on the show in which she details strange vampire folklore (and why they love to count), Claire Maldarelli shares a weird pepper-related medical condition, and Rachel gets into why some founding fathers bathed outside, in the open air, naked.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 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.
0:27 Speaker 01 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.
0:55 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
1:29 Rachel Feltman? Hey weirdos, it's Rachel. I'm here to introduce one more revisited vintage episode while I'm on parental leave. And yes, this is our last rerun. In just a couple of weeks, we'll be back with a brand new episode with me back in the host seat. And yes, this really is our last rerun because in just two weeks, I'll be back as your regular bi-weekly host. That's bi-weekly as in fortnightly, not twice a week. By the time you listen to this, I will be officially back at work at Scientific American working on my other show, Science Quickly. And yes, we will have started recording new episodes of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. This last rerun is our oldest one yet. It features one of Jess's first appearances on the show,
2:14 Rachel Feltman? maybe actually the first appearance as a host. Along with the always excellent Claire Molderele, we talk about obscure medical conditions that you could only be diagnosed with by Dr. Google, strange tidbits of vampiric lore, and I really stick to my strengths by disrespecting the founding fathers and somehow circling back to the American eugenics movement, but in a fun way. That's right, it's the jalapeno thumb, naked air-breathing Benjamin Franklin, and vampire counting ritual episode. I know you were all thinking it. This is one of our pre-pandemic episodes, so we were all actually recording together in the same room, which is something we never got back to because remote recording works
2:56 Rachel Feltman? really well and working remotely makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. I, for example, am recording from a rather luxurious pantry, at least by New York metropolitan area standards. And yes, it is full of my family's canned goods, so anything good you hear and the audio quality is entirely thanks to Jess. Going way back in our feed to pick out this episode reminded me that we're just a couple weeks out from the show being eight years old, which is totally wild. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a show I started kind of on a lark based on the first idea that popped into my head while I was leading the science team at Popular Science.
3:39 Rachel Feltman? I would eventually become executive editor there and then choose to leave to go freelance because I was burned out and wanted to explore other ways of living. There were a lot of reasons why it was hard to leave Popular Science because it's an amazing publication, but the thing that made me struggle the most was the thought that it would probably mean the end of this podcast. Of course, it's now been several years and we are still on the air, which is wonderful and I hope will continue to be true for many years to come. But the weirdest thing I learned this week has only been able to continue to exist because you love it and you share it with your friends and you comment and review and tell Popular Science how much you enjoy the show.
4:22 Rachel Feltman? Obviously, a lot has changed since then. We're no longer recording in a studio that's actually a closet with a loud steampipe and the sound of midtown traffic just outside. Now it's just me and my cans. The people who have appeared on Weirdest Thing as hosts and as guests have incredible careers, so much stuff going on. Some of them are in entirely different fields now, and we love that for them. Jess, who initially just wanted to pitch in as an intern to help improve our editorial flow on the show, is now a showrunner. I could literally not do this without. I got married, I published my first book, I now have a kid, and I also
5:02 Rachel Feltman? have a whole second show over at Scientific American. It's three times a week, so actually, that's what I spend most of my time doing. And somehow that means I'm a full-time podcast host, which is not what I imagined when I started the show back in 2018. I love what I get to do, and I'm really excited to get back into it and to get back to chatting with you twice a month. But again, none of this would be possible if you didn't love the show loudly. So, thank you so much for making this my job. Okay, I think that's enough sappiness for both the intro and outro, so I won't be back at the end of the episode to add more. But just remember, I'll be back in your feed
5:46 Rachel Feltman? in a regular, normal, present tense way in a couple of weeks.
5:54 Rachel 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. I'm Jess Bodie.
6:14 Speaker 04 I'm Claire Maldarelli.
6:15 Rachel Feltman? So, on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of our fascinating day-to-day lives as popular science reporters and editors. And then we 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. So, Claire, why don't you start with your tease?
6:44 Speaker 04 I would love to. There is a condition called jalapeno thumb.
6:51 Rachel Feltman? Okay, all right. Jess, how about you?
6:53 Speaker 05 I would like to talk about a Hungarian countess who was accused of being a vampire.
7:02 Rachel Feltman? So, a few weeks ago, I had a fact that started with babies being a sideshow attraction and ended with Nazis. And this week, I have a fact that starts with Benjamin Franklin sitting around naked and ends with Nazis.
7:17 Speaker 04 It has got full circle.
7:19 Rachel Feltman? Hmm, okay. So which one do we want to hear first?
7:21 Speaker 04 I like vampires.
7:22 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, okay, let's start with vampires.
7:24 Speaker 05 I would love to start. The reason I got hooked on this countess story is because I was catching up with an old college professor from undergrad, from the University of Pittsburgh, go Panthers. And this professor taught this class called "Vampires: Blood and Empire."
7:40 Speaker 04 That's amazing.
7:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was one of my favorite classes ever. And it was all about the history of vampires. They've been around in history books and records for basically 1,000 years. And they've percolated through different cultures, and it says a lot about these different cultures. So anyway, I was talking to this professor, and she reminded me of this figure named Elizabeth Bathory. And she was a very grim figure, so I decided to dig into her history. She was a Hungarian countess from the 16th and 17th centuries. She was born in Transylvania.
8:13 Rachel Feltman? Whoa.
8:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, very key fact there. And then she married into Hungarian royalty. Things were pretty chill for a while, and then her husband died, and then things just went off the rails. Strange rumors started circulating that she was murdering her servants and torturing them. And they were all just young women, too. It was very strange. The Hungarian king heard that this was going on. He was like, "Oh, that's pretty weird. Let's hold a trial and figure out what's going on."
8:46 Speaker 04 Let's hold a trial.
8:48 Speaker 05 Yes, let it, let us really figure out what's going on here. They found out through this trial that she had for sure, they had evidence of her killing 80 women.
8:57 Rachel Feltman? Which is interesting because usually when a bunch of rumors start about a woman living alone, doing nefarious things, it is like not true.
9:06 Speaker 05 Totally, yeah, this is the exception, I guess.
9:08 Rachel Feltman? That's just like the Salem witch trials.
9:09 Speaker 05 Totally, totally.
9:10 Rachel Feltman? So it is shocking that in fact she was murdering people.
9:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:15 Rachel Feltman? It's a real plot twist.
9:15 Speaker 05 It is, it is shocking and, you know, they had evidence of 80 people, but really, the estimates say that she killed over 600 young women back then, which would make her the most deadly serial killer of all time, if that holds up.
9:31 Rachel Feltman? Or the most deadly one that got caught.
9:33 Speaker 05 Ha ha. And so she was always, you know, a troubled child growing up. She always like wanted to see the servants getting punished, you know, growing up. So there's always like some signs that she was a little bit of a sadist. But it seemed like the power really went to her head, maybe when her husband died. And critically, you know, with all of these murders, she, people like saw her bathing in the blood of her victims. She was very, very fixated on the blood. So people thought that was a, that she was a vampire for this reason.
10:01 Rachel Feltman? That could be a bad sign.
10:02 Speaker 05 Yes, you know, a key sign there. The reason she did this is because bathing in blood, especially the blood of virgins, was thought to, you know, increase like your youthfulness, like make your, your skin like just glowing and make you look young.
10:16 Speaker 04 Young blood. People are obsessed with that through the centuries.
10:21 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, like tech moguls are still trying to get their hands on young blood. And it's working. Don't, teenagers, don't sell your blood to tech billionaires.
10:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, really.
10:32 Rachel Feltman? Well, and then there are the vampire facials.
10:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was gonna, I, yes, I was, that was my next point.
10:37 Rachel Feltman? Go on.
10:38 Speaker 05 Oh, yes, well, as, as you probably know, vampire facials are where you-
10:41 Speaker 04 I don't know vampire facials.
10:44 Speaker 05 Hold on to your seat, Claire. You get your blood drawn, it's your own blood, it's not somebody else's blood.
10:49 Speaker 04 Very good.
10:49 Speaker 05 But they like spin it to get the platelets, like the plasma. And then they do like microdermabrasion, I think, or it's like they do the needling on your face with your own blood to like get the platelets into your skin, right?
11:01 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, it's basically like plumping up your skin with your own blood. You bleed your own blood and then they stick it in your face.
11:09 Speaker 05 Nobody makes me bleed my own blood.
11:11 Speaker 04 But this is not a proven successful treatment, or it is?
11:14 Speaker 05 So there are some studies that show that it encourages tissue regeneration kind of thing. But it's not supposed, it's not going to be like, it's not going to cure your wrinkles like people say it will.
11:25 Speaker 04 Right, right. No miracle.
11:27 Speaker 05 No, it's not. Tis no miracle.
11:29 Rachel Feltman? Also, won't anything that jabs a bunch of tiny needles in your face encourage tissue regeneration? Because your body will be like, we need to regenerate this tissue.
11:37 Speaker 05 Yes.
11:38 Rachel Feltman? So I wonder how much the blood actually contributes.
11:42 Speaker 05 That's a really good point. I wonder too. Crack the case.
11:47 Speaker 05 But back to vampires. I also just wanted to talk about a few of my favorite all-time greatest hits vampire facts. Because vampires have been around for a thousand years. There are so many great facts.
11:58 Speaker 04 I feel like I need this. I don't know very much about vampires.
12:00 Speaker 05 I'm so happy to provide. So my absolute favorite fact, it has to do with how people used to bury vampires, or people that they thought were vampires. And after they would bury them, they would sprinkle poppy seeds on the grave. Because vampires are compulsive counters.
12:22 Rachel Feltman? Okay, checks out.
12:23 Speaker 05 Yes. So when the vampire would rise, when the sun would set, at night when the vampire would rise, it would suddenly see all of the seeds around it and would have to count every single one.
12:35 Rachel Feltman? Oh my god.
12:36 Speaker 05 Before going on the hunt.
12:37 Rachel Feltman? One poppy seed. A two poppy seed. Remember, there's literally a Sesame Street character.
12:42 Speaker 05 I was going to bring that up. The Count, who obviously teaches children how to count. And I want to know who on the Sesame Street staff is super deep into vampire lore. You know, like, this is so deep. So there are a lot of funny burial things too, like the counting. People also, oh, I came across this one report of people saying that they would exhume a vampire and steal its sock and fill it with a bunch of little pebbles and throw it in a river. So not only would the vampire feel like his outfit was incomplete and have to recomplete his outfit, once he found his sock, he would have to count the pebbles.
13:20 Rachel Feltman? Oh, yeah. So that's gonna, that's several hours of
13:25 Speaker 05 Yes.
13:25 Rachel Feltman? of time you've bought yourself.
13:26 Speaker 05 Yes, definitely. And the last thing I thought was interesting about vampire burials, people have found bodies from 17th century Poland with, they were buried with a sickle, and the sickle was kind of like around like the chest and neck area of these people. If they were a supposed vampire and they were to sit up and get out of their grave, they would just be decapitated.
13:48 Rachel Feltman? Oh, wow.
13:49 Speaker 05 Oh, god. Like a little booby trap.
13:51 Rachel Feltman? The worst kind of booby trap.
13:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. Which, and my thought process is like, why not just decapitate it?
13:59 Rachel Feltman? While it's sleeping?
14:01 Speaker 05 Right, or just like, yeah, like quote unquote sleeping.
14:03 Rachel Feltman? Right.
14:04 Speaker 05 Or like, if you're
14:05 Rachel Feltman? I guess it's like, it's rude if you cut someone's head off and they're not a vampire.
14:09 Speaker 05 I guess that's true.
14:10 Rachel Feltman? Maybe they worried that they would face like divine retribution for
14:13 Speaker 05 Yeah. That's a great point. That's gotta be it.
14:15 Rachel Feltman? Desecrating the body. But like, if it's a vampire.
14:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. Reading into vampires again, you know, Googling around, falling into Wikipedia holes. I was also reading a little bit about why people were accused of being vampires in the first place, and I came across this condition called porphyria, which is a group of diseases.
14:36 Rachel Feltman? Oh, god, I think I'm gonna get them now. It's not good for me.
14:40 Speaker 05 It's when these substances in your body, called porphyrens, I believe is how you would say it, they build up and they affect your skin and your nervous system, and basically it makes you very pale and very sensitive to sunlight. So like, if you go out in the sun and you had one of these diseases that falls under the porphyria umbrella, your skin might blister or react very poorly. And also, another symptom of this would be that your gums recede, so your teeth look really big.
15:12 Rachel Feltman? And it also can affect your mental state, too, right? All I know is that when I was a goth middle schooler, one of my favorite poems was called Porphyria's Love Song, or something like that. And it was about a man going crazy and strangling his girlfriend with her hair, I think.
15:28 Speaker 05 Oh, my god.
15:29 Rachel Feltman? Like I said, goth middle schooler.
15:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:31 Rachel Feltman? I don't remember the details, but I know Porphyria was involved.
15:34 Speaker 05 Well, that would make sense. And people think that it could happen with inbreeding, too, which was the case a lot of the times in these 16th and 17th century royal families, like Elizabeth Bathory. Not saying that she had this disease, but people thought that Vlad the Impaler had porphyria, or a version of it. And he is the one that Dracula, Bromstalker's Dracula, is based on.
15:57 Rachel Feltman? A very stabby man.
15:58 Speaker 05 Truly stabby. Loved a good steak. Those are my facts.
16:03 Rachel Feltman? Wow, that's crazy.
16:04 Speaker 05 I love vampires.
16:05 Rachel Feltman? I'm gonna get porphyria now.
16:10 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, and then we'll be back.
16:17 Speaker 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.
16:43 Speaker 01 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.
17:12 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
17:46 Rachel Feltman? OK, we're back. And Claire, you have some spicy thumbs to tell us about.
17:51 Speaker 04 Yes, I do. Very excited about it. A little while ago, maybe a few weeks ago, I was talking to my sister on the phone. We were catching up about our lives, as we do. And she was like, Claire, last week I got jalapeno thumb. And I was like, what is that? I'm a health editor and also a hypochondriac, and I have never heard of this disease. So it doesn't exist.
18:13 Rachel Feltman? Tell me so I can add it to my arsenal.
18:16 Speaker 04 So she told me what happened. She was making pico de gallo. And about a half hour after she finished, her thumb started burning. She ran it underwater, washed it off with soap, scrubbed it, soaked it with hot water. Nothing helped. The burning continued. So she looked at it, and it didn't seem like there was anything like broken or any cuts or anything like that. But it just literally wouldn't stop burning. So she did like any good Maldarelli sibling would. She turned to Dr. Google, which confirmed to her that she was suffering from quote unquote, jalapeno thumb. And soaking her thumb in milk would help. She did that. And a little while later, the burning subsided. That intrigued me.
19:03 Speaker 04 I had never heard of jalapeno thumb before because I think that medium style store bought salsa is spicy, so I'm very out of the loop on any spicy diseases. But after my Google PubMed Wikipedia searching, it turned out that she was indeed right, as always. So, on the internet, there are a lot of names for this common condition, including jalapeno thumb, though I will admit to my point, this is not the most common name, and it's actually quite rare to call it jalapeno thumb. So I don't know what internet site she was on. It was definitely not WebMD, which is where I start. It's also called hot pepper hands, jalapeno hands, and the most-
19:46 Speaker 05 Hot pepper hands?
19:47 Speaker 04 Yes, that's actually more common name for it. And the most common being Hunan hand syndrome. One article on the University of Maryland School of Medicine's website notes, "Contact with other body parts give rise to other terms such as quote-unquote 'Hunan nose' or 'Hunan eye.'" Interesting. The Hunan in Hunan hand syndrome refers to Hunan cuisine, also known as Xiyang cuisine, which is from the Hunan region of China, and is known for its liberal use of chili peppers. So what is this syndrome? The condition is caused by capsaicin, which is a chemical compound found in the fruit of plants within the capsaicin family. These include red chili peppers, jalapenos, and habaneros.
20:31 Speaker 04 It's a colorless and odorless compound which binds to pain receptors, and this triggers the sensation of intense heat or burning. For certain people, this can be incredibly painful. For my sister, she said when she figured out what it was, and that it was relatively benign, she said she just waited a while and the burning stopped. And I was like, "That would not have been me." But, okay, congrats. But she did say it did go on for hours. And when I looked at some blogs in which people complained about jalapeno hand and red pepper hand, some blogs said it was incredibly painful, and quote-unquote, one blogger said, "I seriously felt like I wanted to cut off my fingers, anything to relieve the pain."
21:11 Speaker 05 Wow. Goodness gracious.
21:13 Speaker 04 Apparently, the severity of the pain depends on how far down the capsaicin has reached in your tissues. So if it's a really superficial one, it's going to go way faster, which I think was my sister's case. And if it's further down, it will burn for longer. Interestingly, just as much as the medical community couldn't agree on a name for it, they also can't agree on the best way to treat it. The most medically based sources say to use milk or some other type of antacid for skin and GI exposure, because I guess you can like eat too much hot peppers and get the burning in your stomach, which I have heard is bad. Again, I can't tolerate medium salsa.
21:58 Rachel Feltman? From the inside out? My god. Well, we have an article on popside.com where one of our former writers, Kendra, ate the spiciest chip in the world. And she described, both in the article and to me, because I was there, how she could feel it going through all the way down, just all through the intestines. And I think the only other thing she ate that day was a whole pint of ice cream. And it was necessary.
22:26 Speaker 04 Isn't there also a video of that?
22:28 Rachel Feltman? Yes, there is. We will, we will put that in our weirdest things post this week. It's, it's great.
22:33 Speaker 04 There were a few other cool remedies that I thought I would share with you if you indeed get jalapeno thumb and milk or some other type of antacid doesn't work for you. One report from the Journal of Toxicology reported that in New Mexico, where chili peppers are often prepared by roasting and manually removing the skin from the fruit, and this is often done barehanded, it causes prolonged burning pain, irritation, and arrhythmia. So in a survey of elderly Hispanic women, treatment with oils or cool tap water were frequently used as home remedies, and a group of researchers wanted to test which one worked better. So they did this.
23:17 Speaker 04 Research study that I will never partake in, in which 20 female subjects immersed their hands in a standardized slurry of green chili for 40 minutes.
23:27 Rachel Feltman? Oh, no.
23:28 Speaker 04 Yes, correct. That was the response I was waiting for. Afterwards, one hand was placed in cool tap water and the other in vegetable oil for a total of 75 minutes. Now, I feel like that's a really good study protocol, right?
23:44 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, it is.
23:45 Speaker 04 Because you're the same person.
23:45 Rachel Feltman? Everybody has two hands.
23:46 Speaker 04 Yes.
23:47 Rachel Feltman? It's perfect.
23:47 Speaker 04 Exactly. Pain was scored using a visual analog scale while the hands were immersed in the chili slurry.
23:54 Speaker 05 What did they do while they were having their hands occupied for an hour and a half?
23:58 Speaker 04 Okay, that's a great question, and I feel like that would give rise to ways to deal with pain.
24:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:03 Speaker 04 Like, yeah, if you find yourself in chili slurry.
24:06 Rachel Feltman? There must have been so many itchy noses during the course of that study.
24:10 Speaker 05 Oh, my god, yeah.
24:11 Rachel Feltman? Why? Well, because like their hands were submerged first in pepper and then in, and I just know that if you, if you can't scratch, everything starts to itch, so.
24:21 Speaker 05 I would probably ask the study administrator to.
24:24 Rachel Feltman? There had to be a.
24:24 Speaker 04 To scratch my nose.
24:25 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, I bet there was a grad student who was just going around, just scratching.
24:30 Speaker 05 Yes, definitely.
24:31 Speaker 04 So, conclusion, cool tap water immersion initially provided more relief while vegetable oil provided better long-term relief from the pain. And I would just start with vegetable oil then, knowing that this apparently happens for hours and hours, so I would go directly for vegetable oil. Just saying. There are a few other case reports of far more extreme examples of jalapeno thumb or hot pepper hands, in which case the person reportedly went to the emergency room and it was only managed successfully by a cocktail of medications, and I will list them all for you. One was a continuous stellate ganglion block, which is literally an injection of local anesthetic in the sympathetic nervous system of the neck.
25:14 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
25:15 Speaker 04 That was accompanied by gabapentin, which I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, which is a serious nerve pain medication and anticonvulsant, plus local ice water, because why not? And last but not least, furocinamide application, which is a topical corticosteroid. Only at that point, the authors say, did the person find any relief.
25:39 Rachel Feltman? Wow.
25:40 Speaker 04 Yes.
25:40 Rachel Feltman? I wonder if that was just because like. Because it's such a weird and intense and unique pain, if it like triggered their nerves to just freak out.
25:49 Speaker 04 Right, right. I wasn't actually able to access the entire article. So I wonder what the conclusions that they found were that this was such a special case of it.
25:57 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
25:59 Speaker 04 So, reading all this, I feel like my sister kind of lucked out with her jalapeno thumb case. But maybe also because she was just so calm about it that she didn't trigger all those reactions. Interestingly, capsaicin is actually used itself as a topical analgesic medicine to treat pain like muscle pain, itching, and neuropathy. And it does this by initially causing neuronal excitation. Hello jalapeno thumb. And that is followed by a long-lasting refractory period, at which point the neurons become desensitized to the stimulus. So it's actually pretty interesting. And it's this weird combination of like pain and relief, which I think is just really cool how the two are so interrelated.
26:44 Speaker 04 I'll leave you with some final notes. While I was researching this, I was like, gosh, one day I'm just gonna get jalapeno thumb. I know it, so let me figure out how to prevent it and not get it.
26:59 Rachel Feltman? Right. So I'm glad that you can detail this.
27:03 Speaker 04 So in the spirit of service journalism here, two final notes. And this is all I could find. Wear gloves and do not touch your eyes while cutting hot peppers.
27:14 Rachel Feltman? That's it?
27:14 Speaker 04 That's all the internet had to offer, including a bunch of medical journals.
27:21 Rachel Feltman? Fine.
27:24 Rachel Feltman? I guess.
27:26 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.
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27:58 Speaker 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.
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29:21 Rachel Feltman? Um.
29:26 Rachel Feltman? All right, we're back and we have time for one more fact, and it's mine. So we're going to start with the fact that Ben Franklin enjoyed taking what he called air baths. Other people would refer to these air baths as Ben Franklin sitting around naked.
29:43 Rachel Feltman? So apparently.
29:45 Speaker 04 Is that technically a bath?
29:46 Rachel Feltman? Well, I'll get into that more. So apparently cold baths were very in vogue as a health aid at the time, but Franklin found them to be too bracing. He found cold air to be much more agreeable. And so he got up almost every morning to sit around naked for around an hour. This is according to a letter he wrote to a friend praising the virtues of the air bath. He would get up almost every morning and he would sit around naked for about an hour, sometimes a little bit less if it was really cold. And then he would like sometimes go back to sleep for a couple of hours afterward. And he was like, it's strengthening and enjoyable and way less bracing than a cold water bath. And I actually found a paper on the subject from a doctor in the early 1900s
30:30 Rachel Feltman? named Doral B. Webb. The only other thing I could find about him was that he ran a sanatorium. But he was reflecting on historical references to air bathing and speculating on the potential health benefits. And there were several other historical figures that he noted had written about sitting around naked in the air and how good it was for them. He basically was arguing that laymen had stumbled upon like a great medical intervention and that doctors should take note. He quoted someone in there as saying, "It made sense because Homo sapiens is not amphibious." Oh, why? So like, we spend too much time either in actual baths or in clothes that like trap our sweat. So he was like, "We are open-air animals.
31:15 Rachel Feltman? We are not swamp creatures."
31:17 Speaker 05 This seems like a way to get out of bathing yourself.
31:21 Rachel Feltman? And out of your clothes. Read lazy. So into the 1900s, people were talking about how great it was to be naked and have the air upon you. And he had some other justifications in this paper I read. One of his arguments was that skin actually evolved to do what clothes do, but thousands of generations of wearing clothing had caused it to atrophy. So if you spent more time naked, you would allow your skin to
31:49 Speaker 05 Grow an exoskeleton.
31:51 Rachel Feltman? Reach a perfect, natural state. One other thing I learned while reading this is that in ancient Greece, the physician and historian Herodotus recommended the sun as a cure for the weak and soft muscles and said that like the sun strengthened you. And apparently Olympians exposed to sunlight improved their physical performance, which they were like, "It's the sun." And of course, now researchers are like, "It was vitamin D." Yeah.
32:17 Speaker 04 They're vitamin D deficient.
32:20 Rachel Feltman? Also, like tans give you muscle definition, so they probably also just looked more buff. But all that Webb knew was that sunbathing had been purported to cause muscle growth. And he was like, "What if it's not the sun? What if it's the air?" And his argument in this letter is that He basically says like, "Well, I got all the benefits without getting a tan, so it must not be the sun," which is dumb. But anyway, then I reached a twist in the story because at the end of this article by Webb, there's a note from a researcher who had responded. And then he responds, you know, "I don't know if you guys are familiar, but the concept of peer review is that people read your paper and like,
33:03 Rachel Feltman? comment on it and decide whether or not it should be published." I think Webb just went ahead and published this. I think things were a little more loosey goosey at the time, but there was still a system of like, your peers might make a note and you might take note of their note. Those notes are the best. Yeah, so somebody was like, "I can't believe that you did not talk about Joseph Knowles, who is a prime example of the strengthening qualities of air for after he lived naked in the name of science, he was able to take down a bear with his own two hands." And some have said this isn't true, but I saw the area where he killed the bear and I believe it. I'm paraphrasing, but that is literally what it said. Oh, my God.
33:47 Rachel Feltman? And Webb responded very credulously to this. He's like, "Oh, yes, you know, I realize I haven't covered every aspect of being naked." He's not like, "Shut up." So then I was really interested in this man, Joseph Knowles, who in 1913, The Boston Post sponsored. He was a professional illustrator and he wanted to go live naked in the woods in Maine for a couple of months and asked The Boston Post to pay for him to do so. And he was like, "He was gonna live like a totally wild life, no clothes, no nothing." And he was like, "I will write updates and draw illustrations on like pieces of birch with charcoal and leave them for you so that you can update your articles." And it was a big hubbub, not surprising.
34:30 Rachel Feltman? He was a naked man who decided to live in the woods. He went missing for a while. He went in with a jockstrap and immediately threw it away. So he was literally just naked out in the woods. And again, he claimed to have killed a small bear with a club in his own two hands.
34:44 Speaker 04 Who claimed it, him himself?
34:46 Rachel Feltman? Yes. And it later came to light that he actually went and hung out at a friend's cabin and like pouted for two months. Which is kind of perplexing because later in life, he repeated the experiment like for real in California. Maybe not naked. I don't know if that was the case, but he did go like live without any assistance out in the woods. So it seems like he could do it. He just didn't do it at this time. The friend he stayed with was like, yeah, he was just lazy. The real damning evidence here is that the bear skin that he said came from a bear that he had killed with his own hands.
35:21 Speaker 04 Oh, no.
35:22 Rachel Feltman? Had bullet holes in it. Oh. Come on, man. Apparently, he bought it from like a fur trapper. I do have a picture that will also be on popsight.com of him. He is still in the jockstrap in this photo. Here he is about to go off into the woods.
35:37 Speaker 04 Thank God.
35:38 Rachel Feltman? And he's just kind of, he's just kind of like a normal looking, kind of pudgy guy. If he was standing up a little straighter, it would look like the Bigfoot photo. Yeah, it absolutely does look like that. And even though the wilderness stunt was a total hoax, it successfully, I think, doubled the post circulation.
35:54 Speaker 04 Wow.
35:55 Rachel Feltman? And allegedly wowed medical professionals, which is the part that I got really interested in. According to the book that Joseph Knowles wrote about his own experience, and this is probably true, Harvard's Dudley Allen Sargent, a physician who invented gymnasiums as we know them, and the modern concept of physical education and personal training. He like invented the concept of testing people for their physical fitness. So he said there was great scientific merit in this quote, "experiment," even though it was a sample size of one, which is not an experiment at all. You know, I could go into the woods and kill a bear and all you would know is that I had gone into the woods and killed a bear. Not tell you anything about the larger population. He looked forward to seeing how a reprieve from modern society, including a salty diet,
36:40 Rachel Feltman? would alter this man. Yeah, he was like, we really want to see what it's like when men don't eat salt. That was apparently at the forefront of his mind. He also said that Knowles, quote, "considerable fat" would protect him from the cold. Oh, burn.
36:55 Rachel Feltman? And then afterwards, and this is from Knolls's book, apparently Sargent said that he was in the pink of condition, if ever a man was. And he came out scoring way higher on Sargent's fitness test than he had before going into the woods, allegedly much higher than Harvard's football players, too. Sargent said, again, this is a quote from Knolls's book, that with his legs alone, he lifted more than 1,000 pounds. I am skeptical. You've seen the photo. Yeah. All of this was being spun up to be about like his exposure to the elements and not just the literal exposure to the air, as that person pointed out responding to Webb's study on the subject.
37:36 Rachel Feltman? But also just like being in the forest, fending for yourself, getting back to your primal roots. And if that sounds kind of gross and troubling, it is going to get more gross and troubling, I promise. Sargent also said that his skin had become more perfect due to exposure to the elements. And in fact, people love to stroke his perfect back skin. No. Sargent said, "It serves him as an overcoat because it is so healthful that it pours clothes and shields him from drafts and sudden chills," which is not how skin works, in fact. So why did everyone buy into this hype? And this is where it gets kind of gross. Because, you know, maybe he lied, maybe this section in his book is totally made up.
38:19 Rachel Feltman? But like, there are newspaper quotes from some of these experts saying similar things. And Sargent definitely was like on board with taking these results really seriously. This story happened to fit really conveniently into a very dark narrative being pushed by many American medical professionals and just the general public at the time. And that was eugenics. It was the peak of the American eugenics movement. Yeah, I know we just talked about eugenics two weeks ago in my story about sideshow babies. I promise I didn't go looking for another story with Nazis in it, but they just keep showing up. Can't get rid of them. Yeah, exactly. In the expert quoting section of the book, there's also a lot of talk of, and this is a quote, "the physical welfare of the race."
39:05 Rachel Feltman? And the degeneration caused by an urge for refinement. So there was a lot of talk in this time in like the early 1900s up into the 20s and 30s about how men, particularly white American and European men, had to get back to their like savage roots to maintain the superiority of the race. They were saying that like life indoors was too easy and it was turning us into sissies, that we needed to get out there and roll around in some dirt, preferably naked. And when I say "we," I of course mean white American men. We ladies were not supposed to be rolling around in any dirt, naked or otherwise. So even the nudist movement in Europe in the 20s and 30s had ties to eugenics. Because nudist magazines, which I learned today were a thing,
39:50 Rachel Feltman? argued that it helped to counter the deception of clothes and makeups to promote natural sexual selection. So you know those tweets where it's like, "Take her swimming on the first date." That's what nudists did.
40:01 Speaker 05 Oh, my goodness.
40:02 Rachel Feltman? I'm sure there were some very nice nudists, by the way. No offense if your grandmother was a 1920s nudist. I'm sure she was lovely. And in fact, the Nazi party harnessed nudism in a lot of ways. They outlawed nudist groups, not surprisingly. But they also kind of took this idea of celebrating bodily ideals. There's one Third Reich text that's like, "We celebrate the women with the best racial background and the most beautiful bodies for breeding. No one will be able to conceal his or her flaws and weaknesses behind clothes." So they were very much like, "The form, the human form. It must be perfect. Go hang out in the woods." The moral there is that even if you think you're just reading a romp
40:47 Rachel Feltman? about a man running around in the woods naked for fun, there may be a eugenics angle there. So tread lightly. To end on a note that has nothing to do with Nazis, I wanted to know what the actual health benefits were of running around naked, if any. You know, was Benjamin Franklin on to something? Or did he just like being in the nude? Which is fine. Everything I could find, I couldn't really not find any like hard medical literature about nudity in this regard. I did find some physicians talking about like specific health benefits, just based on their experience. It all came down to like really basic things like avoiding swampiness.
41:31 Rachel Feltman? It's not good to constantly be covered in sweat and clingy clothes and your body needs to breathe, particularly your genitals. Like a lot of the stuff about the benefits of nudity are really about like sleeping without underwear on, which my mom, who's an OB-GYN, has told me my whole life.
41:47 Speaker 04 Really?
41:48 Rachel Feltman? Like, don't sleep with underwear on.
41:49 Speaker 04 I have been told that too, yes.
41:50 Rachel Feltman? It's just, it's not necessary and your body needs air. And so that's true. There's no magic to that. There's nothing special about the air. It's just that there's something not great about wearing tight clothes all day. Also, if you're sleeping naked, it means you're sleeping colder and human bodies are generally designed to want to sleep as the temperature drops because that happens at night. And that's one of the things that like our modern world has kind of taken away from us, those natural temperature fluctuations. So, you know, that can be a reason why sleeping in the nude can be good for you. Vitamin D is great, so that doesn't mean you have to be in the nude. It does mean that spending time outside and being exposed to sun is important.
42:32 Rachel Feltman? Also, there's like research that spending time in the nude with friendly people you trust is good for your self-confidence and for building social bonds. So, you know, in particular contexts, like, I don't know, there are countries where people sauna together in the nude. Maybe that's something you want to do. Check in with your friends, make sure everybody's down first, but like, sure, that could help you bond and all feel good about your bodies, which is important. So, the real takeaway is do what you feel and wear breathable fabrics, but probably no particular health benefits to just like sitting outside in the woods naked for an hour every day.
43:14 Rachel Feltman? If it makes you feel good and you're not bothering anybody with your forest nudity, that's fine.
43:20 Speaker 04 I would be afraid of ticks.
43:21 Rachel Feltman? Yes, that is a good point. So, actually, I take that back. Even if you think it's good for you, do a tick check. A thorough tick check. Yes, and stay away from poison ivy. Basically, if you're gonna do nude air bathing, I would recommend like an enclosed porch or like a window, just like be in a large room with a window, which is what Benjamin Franklin did. I don't think he was like rolling around in the mud anywhere.
43:43 Speaker 05 So he had it right all along.
43:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
43:47 Rachel Feltman? Wise old Ben. That's it. That's the whole story. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I learned a lot about vampires.
43:54 Speaker 04 Same. I really like vampires now.
43:56 Speaker 05 Oh, my God, really?
43:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:58 Speaker 05 Wow, that's great.
43:58 Speaker 04 I feel like they were just such an unknown to me. I had no connection. Now I have a new disease.
44:05 Rachel Feltman? Well, congratulations, Jess.
44:07 Speaker 05 Yes, victory.
44:10 Rachel 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.
44:43 Speaker 01 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.
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