Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show, Ridiculous Historians. What's the hungriest you've ever been,
Speaker 1: what's the most you've eaten at one time? And are
Speaker 1: you a fan of competitive eating? I am my name's Ben.
Speaker 1: My name is no I'd said, probably maybe a Korean
Speaker 1: barbecue situation or an old school buffet where you really
Speaker 1: feel compelled to get the bang for your buck. You
Speaker 1: know you you've paid an amount Korean barbecue, especially because
Speaker 1: they just keep on bringing it, and there was all
Speaker 1: a little bond chon which I know you like little sides,
Speaker 1: So that's a that's a recipe for gluttony. There, your Noel,
Speaker 1: That is who I am. True. Thank you for reminding
Speaker 1: me and the listeners. Um, that would have been a
Speaker 1: real bund of contention if we had moved forward without
Speaker 1: saying each other's names. In addition to super Bruster, Casey Pegrum,
Speaker 1: that's right, Casey, what's the You don't strike me as
Speaker 1: a particularly gluttonous dude. None of the three of us
Speaker 1: are nine probably the closest. But do you recall ever
Speaker 1: eating so much that you you felt like terrible about it? Oh? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've I've I've been in those situations a few times.
Speaker 1: Nothing not like a competitive eating, sort of just practicing
Speaker 1: on my own, you know, just getting getting ready for
Speaker 1: the big day perfect maybe a family holiday situation or
Speaker 1: something exactly exactly. But you know, I have had that
Speaker 1: experience of paying for an extremely expensive buffet and then
Speaker 1: feeling like, uh, I gotta get my money's worth. Did
Speaker 1: that recently in Vegas? Actually I knew it, the old
Speaker 1: Vegas Buffet and we waited like probably listed two hours
Speaker 1: to get up to the line, and only then did
Speaker 1: they tell us it's like a hundred dollars ahead or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's just like, well, we're gonna be eating a lot
Speaker 1: of crab legs and you know, just trying to maximize
Speaker 1: our value. It's insane. I've seen people. I've seen people
Speaker 1: get a ticket for Vegas Buffet and go in at
Speaker 1: eleven and then literally hang out on the premises long
Speaker 1: enough to just use the bathroom and get hungry again.
Speaker 1: That's pretty much what you gotta do. But um, we
Speaker 1: made the best of it. Is there a prime rib station? No?
Speaker 1: Actually I was disappointed. There was not much in the
Speaker 1: way of steak, but there were other kind of fancy
Speaker 1: seafood based things ahead. I would expect. Yeah, yes, I
Speaker 1: was expecting like filemon or something. But um, you know,
Speaker 1: they did have enough. I don't know if we actually
Speaker 1: covered our our our outlet for that, but you know
Speaker 1: it was it was a good buffet anyway. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's weird because the way that Vegas buffets are priced,
Speaker 1: they are making a ton of money off most people,
Speaker 1: because most people are going to eat maybe a plate
Speaker 1: or two and then say, well, I want to go
Speaker 1: do the Vegas stuff, right, I don't want to see
Speaker 1: a show, go to a casino or drive to the
Speaker 1: Hoover Damn. I uh. I've been fascinated by competitive eating
Speaker 1: for a long time as a participant, as a participant,
Speaker 1: not so much as an observer. Love it. Kobayashi, Sonya,
Speaker 1: the Black Widow, Thomas uh, any number of people. What
Speaker 1: one thing that's interesting about eating what makes us full
Speaker 1: is there's a thing called the I think it's called
Speaker 1: the safety responsive to this. It does have something to
Speaker 1: do with like you've got to trick your body into
Speaker 1: not telling your brain that it's full. And that's a
Speaker 1: big principle of competitive eating, right, Yeah, that's why so
Speaker 1: much of it is time. So years ago on a
Speaker 1: YouTube show, I was doing that. I will um, I
Speaker 1: think you've seen it, Casey, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: share it with anyone. I did. I did an experiment
Speaker 1: with the sadity complex, and essentially it means it takes
Speaker 1: your stomach about seventeen to twenty three minutes to tell
Speaker 1: your brain it's full. So you can eat like a
Speaker 1: god or a demon or a just a swirling vortex
Speaker 1: or black hole, uh, for for up to that amount
Speaker 1: of time, often before your body goes whoa buster. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some of this is going back out right. And that's
Speaker 1: the thing. I mean, you know, you think about Greek
Speaker 1: Bacchanalian feasts and all of the vomitoriums and all of
Speaker 1: that stuff. Is that is that real? I mean, is
Speaker 1: that actually something that you can do to just continue indulging. Uh,
Speaker 1: people have done it, but that is not healthy for you.
Speaker 1: You know, that's that's not There's a reason we haven't
Speaker 1: evolved to eat that way because ultimately it can, uh,
Speaker 1: it can damage your system. You know. Food can be
Speaker 1: a tough thing. Um. It's it's strange too, because we're
Speaker 1: the more we learn about science. The more we're learning
Speaker 1: about things we usually just took for granted or even
Speaker 1: in some cases treated like I know this is gonna
Speaker 1: be a controversial word for some of us, treated like
Speaker 1: a freak show territory. And that's where that's where we
Speaker 1: get to today's story. Yeah, it's true. Today's story is
Speaker 1: about a gentleman by the name of Casey helped us
Speaker 1: with us earlier. I think I'm gonna do my level
Speaker 1: best Casey on the case, Casey on the case indeed,
Speaker 1: which is apparently uh Are. It's thought to be a
Speaker 1: nickname that came from a very popular French phrase which
Speaker 1: I adore, Bom bom, which means it's sort of like
Speaker 1: boom goes the dynamite. I think that's literally what it means.
Speaker 1: Uh used to describe fireworks or explosives. Um and Uh.
Speaker 1: This gentleman who we only know by was born in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy two in Leon and Um by the time
Speaker 1: he was seventeen, despite Um reportedly being able to consume
Speaker 1: a quarter cow's worth of beef in a single day,
Speaker 1: he only weighed a hundred pounds, which is so that's
Speaker 1: always fascinating me about the world of competitive eating ben
Speaker 1: often those uh, the folks that's excel at of the
Speaker 1: best are pretty slim. Yeah, yeah, it's true. There was
Speaker 1: a rumor for a long time that Ta Caro Kobayashi,
Speaker 1: one of the one of the very slender competitive eating champions,
Speaker 1: was actually somehow mutated and that his stomach could expand
Speaker 1: beneath his rib cage so for more storage space. That
Speaker 1: was never confirmed as far as I know, But if
Speaker 1: you think about it, the bigger dudes are also their
Speaker 1: stomach has less room to expand because there's more muscle
Speaker 1: and stuff around, right. Yeah, and uh, but the thing
Speaker 1: about tell is he he would beyond, well beyond just
Speaker 1: consuming beef uh and copious amounts um. He had a
Speaker 1: penchant for eating just about anything. Uh and and and
Speaker 1: we'll get to in a second. But this is actually
Speaker 1: a condition, a very rare condition known as polyphasia UM,
Speaker 1: which is characterized by un insatiable hunger, uncontrollable eating um
Speaker 1: and also, again as pointed to by his slender build,
Speaker 1: a very very high metabolism UM. So he parlayed this
Speaker 1: into a career with a traveling freak show. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: had a rough, rough life. He was kicked out of
Speaker 1: home as a teenager, and according to a couple of reports,
Speaker 1: he traveled around France, became a bit of a vagabond,
Speaker 1: and at first he was traveling with bandits and sex workers,
Speaker 1: and then later he became uh sort of a warm
Speaker 1: up act to another traveling show, where he would just
Speaker 1: he would swallow stuff. He was like that kid you
Speaker 1: hear about in preschool or elementary school, who's eating you know,
Speaker 1: glue or something for a dollar or whatever whatever the
Speaker 1: going rate for glue eating is now, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Let us know, what was it back in your glue
Speaker 1: eating days? Ben, I never eat glue. Know what about you?
Speaker 1: What was it in your day? Well, I'm more sniffed glue, um,
Speaker 1: but I never People will pay for that, No, no
Speaker 1: they don't. But it was a passion, a passion. I'm kidding.
Speaker 1: I didn't do that. But but but I only asked you
Speaker 1: about the eating glue thing is because you came clean
Speaker 1: on this here very show about your goldfish eating days.
Speaker 1: So I assume maybe you had other experimental eating periods
Speaker 1: polyphasia D Yeah, no, no, not that much. But I
Speaker 1: I even in my wild days, I had nothing on,
Speaker 1: nothing on to oh gosh, no, none, few few would
Speaker 1: or could or absolutely should. Yeah. He uh, he would
Speaker 1: when he was doing the traveling show. As he's evolving
Speaker 1: towards this uh you know, this kind of freak show
Speaker 1: thing mentioned earlier, He would eat corks, stones, live animals.
Speaker 1: One time he ate a whole basket of apples, which
Speaker 1: I think whether or not that's impressive depends on the
Speaker 1: size of the basket, doesn't it, Because there could be uh,
Speaker 1: there could be a tiny basket, there could be a
Speaker 1: gigantic like bushel load basket. Did he eat the basket
Speaker 1: as well as the apples is my question? Right? I
Speaker 1: think I think in that ace he just ate the apples.
Speaker 1: But what a big finished to eat the basket. He
Speaker 1: also was physically, he was He had some unique characteristics, right,
Speaker 1: Like his lips are described in Messy and Chic dot
Speaker 1: com with this great title this article with his great
Speaker 1: title whatever you do, don't tell the French about to Od.
Speaker 1: They say that he almost he had like almost non
Speaker 1: existent lips, and he had a really wide, kind of
Speaker 1: frog like mouth. This I had a hard time believing
Speaker 1: his mouth could hold twelve eggs at once. Are they
Speaker 1: chicken eggs? Again? It's like the basket. Is it a
Speaker 1: quail egg? I can believe that. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: can only assume that they mean quail eggs. But he
Speaker 1: also had another particularly stomach turning feature. Um that's a pun.
Speaker 1: Also preparing listeners is pretty gross. His you use the
Speaker 1: word deflated, ben, His deflated stomach sack um hung loose
Speaker 1: in such a fast and that he could actually wrap
Speaker 1: it around his body like a belt. Yeah. Picture that
Speaker 1: for a minute, so you know how we're talking about
Speaker 1: this South Air Probably the closest analog I could draw
Speaker 1: as if someone has um been exercising, or for one
Speaker 1: reason or another, they lose a lot they're they're a
Speaker 1: very big person. They lose a lot of weight very quickly.
Speaker 1: Your skin is just another organ, right, and so it
Speaker 1: can still hang down or deflate because there's it's there's
Speaker 1: less stuff under it than there used to be. And
Speaker 1: for from what what we can tell, it seems like
Speaker 1: he had been routinely eating uh so much stuff to
Speaker 1: such an extreme that his stomach, the flesh over his
Speaker 1: stomach had kind of naturally over time grown or expanded,
Speaker 1: so that like like you said, nol, when he's not eating,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of like an empty tack, you know, yep. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then an extreme polyophasia is super super were almost
Speaker 1: to the point where is it Isn't it kind of
Speaker 1: almost like looked on with a little bit of suspicion,
Speaker 1: like is it really is a really a real thing?
Speaker 1: For some time it had been considered anecdotal. But there's
Speaker 1: there's some science we can get into, uh maybe towards
Speaker 1: the end, because science does have an answer. Uh, And
Speaker 1: we have to tell you the story about today because
Speaker 1: it's a story spoiler alert that you may be able
Speaker 1: to see in the modern world as insane as it sounds. Sure, um,
Speaker 1: so we'll definitely get to that that science. But it
Speaker 1: is characterized the concept of it as someone um just
Speaker 1: not being able to control their appetite at all. And
Speaker 1: the extra kind of disturbing feature is that it typically
Speaker 1: involves eating non food items. Yeah, it's it's really similar,
Speaker 1: but it's not like uh, pica or pika. It's called
Speaker 1: you know, when people eat clay, which is a thing
Speaker 1: that happened here in the American South. Cause it's unrelenting,
Speaker 1: it's an insatiable hunger. It's it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: real life version of the myth of Tantalus. You know
Speaker 1: Tantalus who was up to his chin in uh delicious liquids,
Speaker 1: and then he's got grapes so close to his face,
Speaker 1: and every time he tries to grab a grape or
Speaker 1: a fruit or whatever, and every time he tries to
Speaker 1: take a sip, it vanishes. It's it feels like it
Speaker 1: goes beyond a medical condition to some sort of biblical curse. Really,
Speaker 1: you'll eat, never be full, And that's exactly the case.
Speaker 1: And in a big bone of contention within his household
Speaker 1: when he was a kid, his parents had become so
Speaker 1: frustrated with their inability to satiate him, and it was
Speaker 1: honestly a financial burden. He would cry and cry and
Speaker 1: cry even when he had just completed a massive meal.
Speaker 1: They finally kicked him out of his house, and that
Speaker 1: is when he kind of began that life is sort
Speaker 1: of a nomad traveler um and leagued up with everyone
Speaker 1: from sex workers to the fee that you mentioned, and
Speaker 1: then eventually found his way into sort of the carnival
Speaker 1: lifestyle um where he was he was taken in and
Speaker 1: welcomed um. He became a street performer in Paris on
Speaker 1: the pomp Neuf, and that was an area that was
Speaker 1: considered so disreputable in CD that even known U philanderer
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin founded too sketchy to to walk across it
Speaker 1: as a bridge in Paris. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this
Speaker 1: is not a super correct term nowadays. But what he
Speaker 1: was doing, his act was pretty much it was a
Speaker 1: predecessor to the famous, you know, circus geek acts of
Speaker 1: yesteryear when someone would eat a live chicken. But he
Speaker 1: didn't just eat live chickens. And we have firsthand accounts
Speaker 1: of Tony's act. Here's a quote, and I warn you
Speaker 1: this is not not super appetite scene. He sees the
Speaker 1: live cat with his teeth event traded, that's the word, disemboweled,
Speaker 1: inventraated it, sucked its blood and ate it, leaving the
Speaker 1: bear skeleton. Only. He also ate dogs in the same manner.
Speaker 1: On one occasion, it was said that he swallowed a
Speaker 1: living deal without chewing it. That's disgusting. Yeah, is that
Speaker 1: part of the show or that stuff he just did
Speaker 1: in his own private alone times. This was part of
Speaker 1: the show. That's that's why whenever you see a street
Speaker 1: show and someone says, who has a pet in the audience,
Speaker 1: just make for the hill desertially, definitely don't don't offer
Speaker 1: up your your little your sheetzu. Um. That is really
Speaker 1: disturbing and well absolutely barbaric. And I can't believe people
Speaker 1: were into this. Uh. I would think, you know, that
Speaker 1: would have caused people to just you know, turn and disgust.
Speaker 1: But I guess people's appetites were pretty disgusting back in
Speaker 1: those days, and they had a different, less sanitized idea
Speaker 1: of entertainment. If you were the kind of person who
Speaker 1: would watch this guy eat random stuff, if that was
Speaker 1: the way you wanted to spend your afternoon, you would
Speaker 1: have to be prepared for the smell, the aroma, the stench,
Speaker 1: because although Torreto was a you know, average sized dude
Speaker 1: and and pretty much on the skinny side, he had
Speaker 1: a big smell. He had big smell energy. We found
Speaker 1: something in the London Medical and Physical Journal in eighteen
Speaker 1: nineteen describing his smell nel. Since I did the eating
Speaker 1: the cat thing, do you want to handle the stench part? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I will. I will just preface by saying that this
Speaker 1: stench followed him around his whole life. It was something
Speaker 1: that was reported as early as when he was seventeen,
Speaker 1: and would sneak into town to eat the cows feed.
Speaker 1: Uh and he you know again, had had that slender build,
Speaker 1: but always was followed around by this putrid stench. So
Speaker 1: here is that quote from the London men Nicle and
Speaker 1: Physical Journal from eighteen nineteen quote, try my best to
Speaker 1: get through this Tar was constantly covered in sweat, and
Speaker 1: from his body a vapor arose sensible to the site
Speaker 1: and more so the smells so wait like stink lines
Speaker 1: wow okay, and more so to the smell. He had
Speaker 1: a wispy blonde hair and a large mouth surrounded by
Speaker 1: slender lips and discolored teeth. He frequently burped and farted
Speaker 1: and had constant particularly odorous Ben, why would you do
Speaker 1: this to me? His bowel movements. I had a cat.
Speaker 1: I can't I can't tell which one's worse. I think
Speaker 1: you're right, Ben, I think maybe the cat was worse.
Speaker 1: But sound effects of burps and farts just real quick,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's one of those like the ship sounds
Speaker 1: are like from rend and stimpy. When one of those
Speaker 1: smelly looking close ups local high pressure farted exactly exactly
Speaker 1: uh odorous bowel movements. That was my favorite member of
Speaker 1: the bangor Um, which one would expect from someone who's
Speaker 1: diet consisted of massive amounts of both food and non
Speaker 1: food items. All right, First of all, I want to
Speaker 1: know what one would expect from from the smell of
Speaker 1: someone who ate non food items. Depends on the food items.
Speaker 1: If they're just swallowing rocks, they'll probably pebbles, will probably
Speaker 1: just pass through and maybe not make a big smell.
Speaker 1: But if it's organic non food items, I would imagine
Speaker 1: at some point it also interacts with your your microbio,
Speaker 1: your your gut flora, so you can get some pretty
Speaker 1: uh disgusting stuff. Today, I would have been set to
Speaker 1: be a street for performer, you know. And and keep
Speaker 1: in mind, uh, there is a history in France of
Speaker 1: very successful performers doing things that might be disgusting to us,
Speaker 1: like professional farters flash list, what was that guy's name?
Speaker 1: So this is like, this is not an unusual thing
Speaker 1: in the history of performance in France. And could today
Speaker 1: I have made a living doing this, Yeah, probably, but
Speaker 1: something intervened as as you said, he was born in
Speaker 1: what seventeen seventy two in seventeen eighty nine, France was
Speaker 1: racked by the French Revolution, and so today I to
Speaker 1: join the French military. He didn't fight, He helped people
Speaker 1: out with day to day task and then when he
Speaker 1: would help them, they would give him their rations and
Speaker 1: he would eat them. And eventually he ended up in
Speaker 1: the military hospital because no matter what he ate, he
Speaker 1: was still hungry, and the physicians wanted to see how
Speaker 1: far they could go, so they quadrupled as rations. He
Speaker 1: ate those, he was still hungry. He also ate gauze
Speaker 1: that was intended, you know, to patch up soldiers, and
Speaker 1: he ate any live animals he could find. And then
Speaker 1: one time true story, they found him in a gutter
Speaker 1: during his time at the hospital, shoving fistfuls of literal
Speaker 1: garbage into his mouth. I want to also note I
Speaker 1: don't think we hit this yet. Um, we have multiple
Speaker 1: accounts of people saying, yeah, other than eating in the
Speaker 1: disgusting smell, he was a normal dude. But he was
Speaker 1: also super apathetic, like he didn't seem very present. A
Speaker 1: lot of times he was just sort of like, whatever,
Speaker 1: I'll eat it, and uh, And I think that I'm
Speaker 1: building a case towards what I think may have been
Speaker 1: a lower mental function, like I think maybe he wasn't,
Speaker 1: uh wasn't a full set of craons. Oh, I don't
Speaker 1: think so either. I mean definitely seemed to go hand
Speaker 1: in hand. And it's also part of the reason why
Speaker 1: I questioned the medical racity of this quote unquote condition. Um,
Speaker 1: it seems like it was largely a mental condition, and
Speaker 1: not that that makes anything any less real. I mean,
Speaker 1: psychological conditions are are absolutely all consuming for people, and
Speaker 1: they can really cause huge problems in people's quality of
Speaker 1: life and the way they interact with others. But I
Speaker 1: don't know that there's necessarily a physical or physiological thing
Speaker 1: that caused him to, uh, to feel this way, other
Speaker 1: than maybe something that was going on psychologically. Reminds me
Speaker 1: of a condition that's depicted in the show Better called
Speaker 1: Saul or Sault. Goodman's brother has this allergy to electricity. Um,
Speaker 1: but that's largely considered by the medical community to not
Speaker 1: be a real thing. Yeah, the E M F sensitivity,
Speaker 1: it's right. Yeah, So you're right. In the military, he
Speaker 1: was super problematic, but he also there were some creative
Speaker 1: uses for him, right, There were attempts, There were attempts
Speaker 1: to make him useful. So the weird thing is he
Speaker 1: also wasn't gaining weight, by the way, still weight. I
Speaker 1: think you mentioned earlier a hundred pounds when seventeen he
Speaker 1: still had that ballpark weight, and he looked he was
Speaker 1: exhibiting signs of under nourishment as a matter of fact.
Speaker 1: So they thought, all right, we're gonna we're gonna try
Speaker 1: to make this guy useful because he has something. It's
Speaker 1: not perfect, but he has uh, he's got potential, he's
Speaker 1: got an unusual set of skills. Right, that's right, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, might as well figure out how to make
Speaker 1: some use out of the guy you gotta hang around with,
Speaker 1: smelly dude. Let's figure out how to take his uh,
Speaker 1: his gift, let's say, and then put it to good
Speaker 1: militaristic use. Yep. And this is when I'm gonna muddle
Speaker 1: through this casey I hope you're still friends at the end.
Speaker 1: This is when General Alexandre du said, you know what,
Speaker 1: no man left behind. We can give this kid something
Speaker 1: to do. France is now at war with Prussia and
Speaker 1: tas weird digestive condition makes him the perfect spy. So
Speaker 1: he says, sorry, I'm putting some documents inside this would
Speaker 1: box that I you're hungry, right, go ahead and eat this,
Speaker 1: and then we'll just wait for it to pass through
Speaker 1: your body, and then we'll have you know, whichever soldiers
Speaker 1: in the most trouble that day go through his stool
Speaker 1: and then fish the box out to see if you
Speaker 1: can still read the message. This experiment worked, and so
Speaker 1: to has given his first mission as a spy. Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: it was a noble experiment. I suppose you could say, um,
Speaker 1: one that wouldn't ultimately be repeated. But he was disguised
Speaker 1: as a Prussian peasant UM and asked to sneak by
Speaker 1: enemy lines to deliver a top secret message to a
Speaker 1: captured colonel, a French colonel. Um. The message was to
Speaker 1: be enclosed in a box that was then um swallowed
Speaker 1: whole by it till Um. But unfortunately he didn't really
Speaker 1: make it to his destination UM, because of of the
Speaker 1: aforementioned putrid smell did not lend itself to covert ops,
Speaker 1: did it, Ben, Yeah, that's correct. It's it's a good point.
Speaker 1: If you are a spy, you don't want to have
Speaker 1: a unique sort of old factory tone. Let's call it
Speaker 1: I'm searching for diplomatic ways to use the word stink. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they find him. He is strip searched, they whip him,
Speaker 1: they torture him for most of a day, and then
Speaker 1: eventually he says, okay, I'm here take a secret message,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm sneaking into my in my gut, and
Speaker 1: then people are going to find it in my poop.
Speaker 1: It's about the war. So the Prussians literally chain him
Speaker 1: to a toilet and they just wait, God for hours
Speaker 1: and hours, and he still stinks, by the way, and
Speaker 1: terras of course, starving. He has to wait until he
Speaker 1: has a bowel movement. Eventually he does void uh the
Speaker 1: wooden case and he tries, this is okay, this is
Speaker 1: very gross is according to the London Journal. After he
Speaker 1: couldn't hold it anymore and he passed the case, he
Speaker 1: swallowed it again to try to keep the enemy from
Speaker 1: getting it. They finally do get the box out of him,
Speaker 1: and all they find inside is evidence that this is
Speaker 1: a test run. The note in the little box just says, hey,
Speaker 1: let us know if this guy today had delivered the box.
Speaker 1: And it turns out the general still, you know, didn't
Speaker 1: really trust the guy or this process enough he needed
Speaker 1: some confirmed success in the field. Yeah, well, okay, good
Speaker 1: on him then, because this whole thing sounded like a
Speaker 1: real recipe for disaster if you asked me, and then
Speaker 1: then sure enough it was. Can you imagine though, like
Speaker 1: swallowing it back down and the whole the whole scenario.
Speaker 1: It's just like it's like reservoir dogs gone awry or something,
Speaker 1: you know, like chained to the toilet it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm surprised no one's made some kind of sick version
Speaker 1: of this movie, like a human centipede style or something.
Speaker 1: You know. This is I should this should this should exist.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I want to see it, but
Speaker 1: I would support its existence as a piece of schlock cinema.
Speaker 1: What do you think, Casey? Yeah, this is this is
Speaker 1: right for some some schlocky goodness. Did you say, ripe? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. The smell is a main character in
Speaker 1: this story. Maybe that's what's holding people back. It's just
Speaker 1: the film technology. It could be a spiritual predecessor to
Speaker 1: the big rock movie that did so this year. Her
Speaker 1: smell it can be called his smell. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: a thought. Maybe people feel like they got tricked though.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I was looking up so many different synonyms
Speaker 1: for smell, stink, stinch, that kind of stuff, just to
Speaker 1: get through this. Anyhow, I'm a big fan of mi
Speaker 1: asthma myself, which I guess is a little bit refers
Speaker 1: to more of like a big picture smell something they laugh,
Speaker 1: you know, um proliferates a bit farther. But I could
Speaker 1: I could you categorize what he had as a miasmas
Speaker 1: that you can actually see the thing? Yeah, it also
Speaker 1: had a miasma was for a time a medical explanation
Speaker 1: for the spread of disease, which is very believable. You
Speaker 1: talked about that in the episode about the Great Stink
Speaker 1: of London. Uh, And okay, so stinking. You know, of
Speaker 1: course there's fetted. Somebody smells fetted, right. Uh. There's also,
Speaker 1: of course spoiled. They're spoiling. Uh. And I was trying
Speaker 1: to find a particular word for that stench, that sulfurus
Speaker 1: stench of rotten eggs. You guys know what I'm talking
Speaker 1: to us. Yeah, I didn't find one. Oh and there's
Speaker 1: also funk reek, fustiness, meluderous, nous o, differousness, which is
Speaker 1: kind of fun and rancidity. Yeah, it's rough, but anyhow,
Speaker 1: these are all just different words to describe what was happening.
Speaker 1: The Prussian general, by the way, is severely po to that,
Speaker 1: and he says, hang the guy, hang him, hang him. Immediately,
Speaker 1: I can't believe I let that guy go. What was
Speaker 1: I think? In a poop spy. But once he had
Speaker 1: calmed down, he said, you know, I feel bad because
Speaker 1: I see this guy so obviously again starving his whole life,
Speaker 1: and he is openly sobbing. He's blubbering at the gallows,
Speaker 1: and so he takes pity on to Rye and he says, Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean, you guys just give him a very very
Speaker 1: thorough spanking essentially and go back to the French lines.
Speaker 1: So he returned, and he was just doing the thing
Speaker 1: he did earlier. He's just like, you know, running coffee
Speaker 1: for people. Yeah. The Prussians essentially just dumped him back
Speaker 1: near that military hospital behind French lines. Um, and he
Speaker 1: you know, made his case to his superiors, which I
Speaker 1: don't think would have been too difficult to make that
Speaker 1: he was not cut out for the spies life and
Speaker 1: that he should, you know, not be asked to do
Speaker 1: any more secret missions. He just wanted to be a
Speaker 1: regular are smelly foot soldier right exactly. And he had
Speaker 1: kind of a patron and a guy named Baron Percy
Speaker 1: at the hospital, and Percy tried to satiated. He gave
Speaker 1: him different treatments that were meant to swash his appetite,
Speaker 1: and none of them were successful. I think. Uh, they
Speaker 1: tried tobacco pills, straight up, vinegar, wine vinegar, and laudanum.
Speaker 1: And the thing about the laudanum is I believe opiates
Speaker 1: do actually cause constipation. So maybe that's where he was
Speaker 1: going maybe, or you know, I can't imagine that it
Speaker 1: would have been particularly comfortable to have all this weird
Speaker 1: crap flitting around in your guts and all of the
Speaker 1: long term damage which we will find out, you know,
Speaker 1: was the case that it would have done to his insides. Um.
Speaker 1: I imagine that the must have been considerable pain a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, but you don't really see that
Speaker 1: in the reports. But maybe that was where he was
Speaker 1: coming from as well, with giving him a little something
Speaker 1: to ease it. Yeah, and this takes a morbid turn.
Speaker 1: We were having fun in a gross way in the
Speaker 1: beginning of the episode, but not only did these treatments
Speaker 1: not work, as a condition appeared to accelerate. There was
Speaker 1: no food that was enough. He had gone past eating trash.
Speaker 1: During one episode, he was actually caught drinking blood that
Speaker 1: had been drawn from other patients in the hospital and
Speaker 1: even nashing on some bodies in the morgue. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: said at this point, it's just becoming sad and really
Speaker 1: really really disturbing. He's almost kind of like taking on
Speaker 1: this kind of gullum like quality where he is just
Speaker 1: you know, becoming more and more inhuman. And that is
Speaker 1: when the disappearance of a fourteen month old baby began
Speaker 1: to generate rumors that Tarar had had somehow gotten a
Speaker 1: hold of the baby and and actually eaten it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can't make this stuff up, man. It's uh, that
Speaker 1: was at the that was was at the very hospital
Speaker 1: that he was admitted to. That's right. And at this
Speaker 1: point it's finally too much for Baron Percy. TDAD has
Speaker 1: in his mind crossed a line. Even if the historically
Speaker 1: we can't confirm this story of the fourteen month old
Speaker 1: baby disappearing, everybody believed it in the hospital, right, and
Speaker 1: you can see why it's not like they just came
Speaker 1: up with a cockamami conspiracy theory. So Baron Percy kicks
Speaker 1: Tarad out the same way that his parents kicked him
Speaker 1: out was when he was a teenager, and he has
Speaker 1: to fend for himself from then on. He falls off
Speaker 1: the radar, is off the grid for like four years,
Speaker 1: and then one day Baron Percy hears from him again.
Speaker 1: He Trado has turned up in a hospital in Versailles. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he was at this hospital because he was in
Speaker 1: fact dying. Um. This is something that I would have
Speaker 1: thought would have happened much sooner, just considering, you know,
Speaker 1: all of the crazy stuff he put in his body,
Speaker 1: and that he put his his his digestive track through.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that he was healthy, um at all.
Speaker 1: And Baron Percy, who was Baron Percy to him in
Speaker 1: the first place, Ben skin of his his patriot, his
Speaker 1: benefactor at the hospital, I see, so he he was
Speaker 1: with him at this point. Um. And he died ultimately,
Speaker 1: uh torout did of tuberculosis in at the young age
Speaker 1: of twenty six. Um. And this is probably one of
Speaker 1: the most uh nauseating parts of the story. But they
Speaker 1: you know, he was absolutely a a fascination and something
Speaker 1: that medical science could potentially learn something from. So and
Speaker 1: of course just just an autopsy is something that happens anyway.
Speaker 1: But he was uh cut open, and there are some
Speaker 1: descriptions of his autopsy that are really really graphic and
Speaker 1: just you know, they really paint a picture of what
Speaker 1: was going on inside this man's body. So I guess
Speaker 1: this one falls to me. Split it's that's the set up.
Speaker 1: Let's see how long it goes. All right, there's two,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I'll do the second one. Let's go back. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's equit. And this is from all That's Interesting
Speaker 1: dot com these accounts, but this is official, very real
Speaker 1: accounts of what this autopsy was like. The entrails were putrified,
Speaker 1: confounded together, and immersed in pus. The liver was excessively large,
Speaker 1: void of consistence, and in a putrescent state. The gall
Speaker 1: bladder was of considerable magnitude. The stomach in a lack state,
Speaker 1: and having ulcerated patches dispersed about it covered almost the
Speaker 1: whole of the addominal region um. His stomach, they found,
Speaker 1: was so massive that it very nearly filled his entire
Speaker 1: ab nominal cavity. His gullet, likewise, was unusually wide, and
Speaker 1: his jaw could stretch so wide open that, as the
Speaker 1: reports put it, a cylinder of a foot and circumference
Speaker 1: could be introduced without touching his palette. That's insane, And
Speaker 1: they don't complete this autopsy spoiler alert. Eventually the smell
Speaker 1: of of the corps is too much and they have
Speaker 1: to stop. They have to throw in the towel. But
Speaker 1: at this point they do learn something. They do have
Speaker 1: a takeaway and they say, well, he wasn't making this up.
Speaker 1: Every weird thing he ate, everything he did was a
Speaker 1: result of this genuine, constant need to eat. He had
Speaker 1: been born with this strange body, and as as they
Speaker 1: say in All That's Interesting dot com, he had been
Speaker 1: cursed to a life of eternal hunger. And let's bracket
Speaker 1: this real quick for the science, right because you said
Speaker 1: we're going to follow up on that now. As you said,
Speaker 1: he had polyphasia of some sort. So it turns out
Speaker 1: it's quite possible that Tara had something called prator Willie syndrome.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of this? We talked about this off here. No,
Speaker 1: I don't think so. It's it's a genetic disorder wherein
Speaker 1: some specific genes lose their function and it results in
Speaker 1: a couple of things. So we can build a case
Speaker 1: for praetor Willie because people afflicted with this are constantly hungry,
Speaker 1: they have mild intellectual impairments, and they will eat tons
Speaker 1: and tons of stuff. But here's the thing. People with
Speaker 1: creator Willie syndrome tend to grow larger, they become obese.
Speaker 1: And that never happened to Tarar. He was he was
Speaker 1: kind of a stick the whole time, except when he
Speaker 1: was eating and his stomach inflated, right right, I mean,
Speaker 1: and then it just snapped back into like a weird
Speaker 1: gelatinous kind of hanging satchel of skin. It's a shame.
Speaker 1: It's a shame. The whole thing is a shame. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, and I look, there is some medical research
Speaker 1: behind this condition. Um. I didn't mean to to poop
Speaker 1: poo it entirely. I think there's some you know, controversy
Speaker 1: behind it. But a guy named Cindy micilroy of who's
Speaker 1: a doctor based in Huntington, West Virginia, said that there
Speaker 1: could be more of an underlying um condition. Uh that
Speaker 1: is pretty common actually to maybe an extreme version called
Speaker 1: hyper thyroidism, which increases metabolism and causes diarrhea, sweating, and
Speaker 1: thin hair. I actually have hypo thyroidism, which is an
Speaker 1: underactive thyroid. This would be an overactive thyroid that would
Speaker 1: cause your metabolism to just balloon out of control. Um.
Speaker 1: And and that that does kind of make sense. Uh
Speaker 1: So I wonder if that's had something to do with it. Um,
Speaker 1: Doctor uh McIlroy seems to think so. Um. And it
Speaker 1: would cause a lot of what tar are suffered from
Speaker 1: some of his symptoms, like diarrhea, sweating, and thin hair.
Speaker 1: But it wouldn't eat live animals. People with hyperthyroidism toy'll
Speaker 1: automatically snack. They don't have cat snacks. They do not.
Speaker 1: They do not. And that's why I tend to think
Speaker 1: that there's some combination of a of a mental illness
Speaker 1: and a some kind of undiagnosable at the time physical
Speaker 1: ailment that sort of perfectly synergized into this bizarre and
Speaker 1: aberrant condition. You know. And people have study this guy.
Speaker 1: Medical historians have contributed quite a bit of literature to him.
Speaker 1: Jon Bondison, it's one of these medical historians works at
Speaker 1: the University of Cardiff and Whales, and Dr Bondison says
Speaker 1: we will likely never see anything like Tada again. Part
Speaker 1: of it is because medicine has improved so much over
Speaker 1: the centuries. Uh. And you know, the hope is that
Speaker 1: if someone with this condition or with this set of
Speaker 1: problems emerged, they would be diagnosed and treated appropriately, right
Speaker 1: instead of being pressed into being some sort of poop spy.
Speaker 1: A phrase that will haunt me now as it should,
Speaker 1: ben should haunt us all So, so this is the
Speaker 1: story of Tara. And the next time that you're hungry,
Speaker 1: or the next time that you are you have eaten
Speaker 1: too much maybe and you're satiated, like our our good
Speaker 1: friend impossible Prime Minister, superproducer Casey Pegram, look around the
Speaker 1: buffet and thank your lucky stars that you are one
Speaker 1: of the people with the ability to get full. And hey,
Speaker 1: Tarar actually lives on in our popular culture, in our zeitgeist.
Speaker 1: He was a pretty popular subject of memes um last year.
Speaker 1: Around August of twenty nineteen, there's a piece in New
Speaker 1: York Magazine called the Hot New Meme is Tarra Exciting
Speaker 1: a tumbler um that featured a quite a few memes
Speaker 1: referencing um Tarre and his supposed uh consumption of a
Speaker 1: fourteen month old French baby. So if you want to
Speaker 1: check that out, you can go to n y mag
Speaker 1: dot com slash Intelligencer, slash two, slash oh A, slash,
Speaker 1: Dash Memes, Dash, Tumbler, Dash, squid word dot HDML. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to read a really long, obnoxious U r L,
Speaker 1: so I do want to point out this as well.
Speaker 1: UH and we'll we'll need to bleep this, so use
Speaker 1: your imagination. Someone posted on tumbler. I know tar is
Speaker 1: the joke of the hour, but it's so incredibly messed up.
Speaker 1: How even now no one has any concrete explanation for
Speaker 1: what his condition was, and a case like that has
Speaker 1: not been recorded since like literally what the He's like
Speaker 1: a really x man, which is kind of true, you know.
Speaker 1: And one of them is uh from an account by
Speaker 1: the name of Johnny Joe's Terrible Table Uh. And it
Speaker 1: the caption reads, when you're a fourteen month old French
Speaker 1: infant in a military hospital in the late eighteenth century
Speaker 1: and that weird hungry guy comes into your room and
Speaker 1: it's a picture of squid word from SpongeBob sitting up
Speaker 1: in bed with his eyes wide boom boom. Indeed. Huh yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: uh so I think that's that's a good place to
Speaker 1: leave it. In the present. Yes, in the present, and
Speaker 1: right around lunchtime oddly enough. Uh, maybe I'll hit up
Speaker 1: the buffet somewhere. Thank you as always to our super producer,
Speaker 1: Casey Pegram, Thank you to Gabe, Thank you to Christopher,
Speaker 1: thank you to Eaves. Huge thanks to research associate Gabe Loser.
Speaker 1: Uh Jonathan's trickling the notorious quister Um wherever he may lurk.
Speaker 1: I hope he's okay. If you want to check us
Speaker 1: out on social media, you can do so by joining
Speaker 1: the Ridiculous Historians Facebook group on Facebook. All you gotta
Speaker 1: do is name me or Ben or Casey or some
Speaker 1: combination of our names or some kind of reference. Lets
Speaker 1: us know that you're a real person and you are
Speaker 1: somehow aware of what this podcast is. As easy as that,
Speaker 1: you can also find us on Instagram and Twitter and
Speaker 1: all of that stuff. You want to find us individually,
Speaker 1: you can find me exclusively on Instagram. I am at
Speaker 1: how now, Noel Brown. I also want to point out
Speaker 1: that you could just get a horrible pun I've heard
Speaker 1: some horrible puns recently, like no matter how much you
Speaker 1: push the envelope, it's still stationary. Uh so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I would let you over for that about could
Speaker 1: never come up with that pun, not yet, but we
Speaker 1: looked at the future. Uh And of course also shout
Speaker 1: out to Alex Williams uh our composer, who also has
Speaker 1: a podcast of his own that history fans will enjoy
Speaker 1: called Ephemeral Check it out while you're on the internet
Speaker 1: as well, said we are people in our own right.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter where I'm at then
Speaker 1: Bowling hs W. You can follow me on Instagram where
Speaker 1: I am at Ben Bowling. Uh and oh no, thanks
Speaker 1: to you. I think I think we're both pretty lucky
Speaker 1: that we can be satisfied with, you know, just a
Speaker 1: good sammy. Yeah in case I love because I know
Speaker 1: you're have you have you made it through your case
Speaker 1: city a phase or you think you're back in man,
Speaker 1: I just can't quit them. Yeah. Is it a sandwich? Though?
Speaker 1: See this is god. You know it's twenty Why are
Speaker 1: we still stuck in labels? I would see it functions
Speaker 1: as a sandwich. I would tend to agree with you,
Speaker 1: Ben let us know what you guys think. We'll see
Speaker 1: you next time. Fix For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.