===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And Ed doesn't know this yet, but this week I'm making him taste all my food before I bite into it. If he lives, I'll think about eating it. And I'm doing this because nothing scares me more than the idea that each piece of food, every sip of water and the very breath that fills your lungs could be tainted with some kind of horrifying death compound, better known to most people as poison. And poison can really fuck up your day. They can paralyze, suffocate, stop your heart and cause gruesome fatal muscle spasms, which are all pretty top tier horrible ways to go. Beyond my paranoia that I'll be secretly sentenced to an agonizing death by friend or foe or Ed, we all have to worry about being poisoned just by existing in the world. In 2022, the latest year we have complete numbers for, there were 15 murders committed via poisoning. That's pretty scary. I don't want to be one of those, but the chances it will happen to me are pretty low. The really scary number is how many preventable or accidental poisoning deaths there were in 2022. 102,958. And those numbers are going up all the time. Total poisoning deaths increased 1% from 102,001 poisoning deaths in 2021. And they have increased to over 8 times the poisoning deaths of 1999's total. So this week, pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and make sure no one drops anything deadly into it. This episode's got plenty of poison, and I'm just realizing we forgot the antidote.

What are we scared?

When are we?

Now it is time for time for Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for joining us again. We are one week away from the season three finale. This time, we're going to try to just take two weeks off to prep more episodes instead of four, so we can get you more scared all the time than you've ever been scared before.

At least more quickly than you've ever been before.

Yeah, more scared, more quickly. And some of that is thanks to our incredible subscribers making that possible. We just got four more this week alone, which was really cool. I think that's one of the best weeks we've had since the first three or four weeks.

Yeah, four new sweet peas have arrived.

And one of them signed up at the I'm Terrified level, so they will be a producer on the show next time we update the list and go over it on air. So thank you very much for that. And before we get started, we just want to do a little more five star review quarter because you guys have been the best about giving us five star reviews. Like we said, four star reviews, fuck on out of here. We only need five star reviews. We only want five star reviews. We want to deserve five star reviews. And we keep getting good ones, so we're gonna keep reading them. This first one here is from July 25th from Jerry the Robot. Five stars, better than your favorite. I regularly ditch my favorite podcasts mid listen when I see a new Scared All The Time drop. I thank Ed and Chris for teaching my kids how to swear. So, yeah dude, you're welcome, Jerry the Robot. I hope they use their swears sparingly.

Or for good.

For good.

just in general for good.

Or for good, for good. I'm sure they will. I'm sure you are a great parent if you're sharing the joy of scared all the time with them. So, thank you very much Jerry the Robot. Ed, would you like to give us another five star review?

Yeah, I'm going to go back to around Christmas 2023.

Okay, all right.

I feel like I love the newbies, but I like the oldies too. So, I'm going to do two, I'm going to pop off two really quickies.

Okay.

One from December 18th. We got, there's no way to say this name. It's letter X, R, D, V, B, G.

Great.

They write, five stars, great show. I really enjoy this show and look forward to more episodes. Short and sweet. That's exactly all you got to do. I love the Longies, but that's also fantastic. And then another shorty right next to them. Oh, this was from December 27th from Ed Fred 23. It's not me. I didn't write this shit.

Sure, sure.

I would never use this name. Ed Fred 23. Great podcast. They write, good take on a fairly heavily covered theme. Really liked the perspective and hosts. Thanks guys. Fun listen. I wonder what that was back in December that was a heavily covered topic. I don't know.

Couldn't tell ya.

Could be anything. They liked it.

Yeah, could be anything. Five stars from Minerva Rose. Spooky vibes with your new best friends. She writes, if you're too busy trying to keep your life from falling apart to actually make friends and hang out with these hypothetical friends, this is an excellent podcast to listen to. Ed and Chris tackle the terrifying topics that keep people up at night, but with the wit and humor that makes sitting through episodes about human cannibalism and floating to a lonely death in space enjoyable.

Oh, wow.

Even though the topics can keep you up at night, Ed and Chris create the same vibe of watching a scary movie in the dorms with your besties when you should be writing your 10-page paper. We'll always recommend. Well, that just melts my heart. That's exactly what we're trying to do here. And Minerva, I'm the one writing the 10-page paper, so you don't have to. So I'm glad you guys are enjoying them. Thank you. Continue to like, share, subscribe. And I think that's pretty much it, Ed. I'm excited for this episode.

Poisons. I'll save more for later.

Perfect. Well, let's get on with this poisonous episode. So today we're talking poison. And I know we sometimes start with a little personal anecdote about something related to the topic of the week, but I don't have one for this. With the exception of food poisoning, as far as I know, I've managed to avoid being poisoned. Ed, have you as well, I assume, or have you poisoned yourself?

I have never been poisoned. I don't believe I've poisoned myself. I mean, we're drinking while recording this, so I guess we are poisoning ourselves.

Yes, we're gonna get to that in just a second.

But no, never personally. I have a strong suspicion that I poisoned at least one husband and probably some animals.

Okay, that's a personal anecdote.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I said, it's gonna be bleeped, so fuck that person.

Well, the details will be bleeped, but yeah, Ed knows a person who probably poisoned some people. Didn't you also tell me when I was telling you that this might be the topic? Didn't you tell me that there was a guy in Connecticut?

Yeah, I'm not just a guy. If, and we may have talked about this in a previous episode, but if you Google my name, you probably before my name even comes up, you're gonna get a different Edward Voccola who poisoned the water supply of a town in Connecticut. And I actually pulled up some articles here. If you wanna read about this guy.

Please.

So again, not personal. It's definitely a personal anecdote to another Ed Voccola.

This is again, ladies and gentlemen, this is 100% not Ed Voccola, the host of the show. This is a very different Ed Voccola who we don't know.

I'm just gonna read a couple of different headlines. So this is out of nbcconnecticut.com. The headline is Bridgeport firefighter fired after alleged acid incident. Then I will pull up Connecticut Post, firefighter accused of poisoning neighbor's water line is fired. Then I'll pull up...

Wait, so what exactly did this guy do? Did he acid attack somebody?

Look, the next headline might answer that for you.

Okay.

From the Valley Independent Sentinel, the headline is Man Dumped Acid in Water Supply.

Oh, okay. There we go. All right. So he did... It was both. It was an acid attack and the acid in this case was used to poison the water supply.

Yeah. So anyway, there's like six or seven more that I might have been clicking on. So let's just take a look here. New Haven Register says, a veteran Bridgeport firefighter charged with dumping poison acid into his neighbor's water line has been fired. Fire chief Brian Rooney says, Edward Voccola, and then this is a quote, brought discredit to the department and was fired for violating the city's ethics code as well as city rules.

This is the city rule of not pouring acid into your neighbor's water supply.

Yeah. Amazingly, that sounds like it's on the books.

Yeah.

The Connecticut Post reports that the 52 year old Voccola, a 22 year veteran, was placed on paid administrative leave following a September 5th arrest by Shelton Police on the attempted criminal assault of a person over 60 and reckless endangerment. A lot to unpack here. One, was fired. Two, I guess wasn't, was just put on paid administrative leave.

Yeah.

Three, attempted criminal assault on a person over 60 is weirdly the hyper-specific law.

Yeah.

And then following reckless endangerment. So he is free on a $25,000 bond.

He's currently hosting a podcast.

Now it's different guy. Authorities say Voccola had ongoing problems with his neighbor and at one point, poured poisonous and highly corrosive muriatic acid on his water supply fittings.

jesus.

Neither Voccola nor his attorney could be reached for comment.

Yeah.

So yeah, interestingly enough, there is an Ed Voccola with quite the history of poison.

Well, I take it back about not having any personal anecdotes. You came through strong on the personal anecdote front. This is great.

Well, yeah. So I have, you know, who shall remain unnamed, who definitely poisoned a husband and got away with it. I believe, allegedly, allegedly. And another one who straight up didn't get away with it.

Well, I'm not going to be able to top that intro at all. So I will move us on to the reason that Ed and I have not become poisoning statistics yet and the reason that most people haven't become poisoning statistics yet. Even though those numbers I mentioned in the beginning are so, so high, it's because those numbers are heavily weighted in drug and alcohol poisoning. We don't necessarily think of drugs and alcohol as poison, but they are. We more commonly call a drug poisoning a drug overdose, and those account for 97% of poisoning deaths, which is why those numbers have gone up eight times the 1999 numbers because of opioids, which now account for three out of four drug overdose deaths in America.

Bummer.

Yeah, big bummer. We don't fuck around with that stuff, so that's one poison we're pretty safe from, although people who were listening when I had my tooth issue will remember I was so easily prescribed opiates.

Overprescribed.

Overprescribed opiates. They did sort of help, but yeah, that was my only brush with them, and I took them mostly as prescribed. I took two extra so I could fall asleep sitting up, so maybe not exactly as prescribed, but generally we're safe from opiates. Alcohol, though, alcohol poisoning is a different story.

That's how we get through this show.

As Ed pointed out, we're both drinking right now. Neither of us are particularly heavy drinkers, I think it's fair to say, but we do both consume alcohol on a pretty regular basis, and alcohol has been around about 9,000 years. It was about 9,000 years ago that humans, specifically the Chinese, Add it again. Add it again.

They really, as far as history goes, they were just out there being like, what about this?

Yeah.

What about this?

Booze, fireworks, they hit everything first, honestly, I think, but.

And yet not the fork.

Oh, that's true. They were so drunk.

Yep, that's probably it.

So it was about 9,000 years ago that they developed what is now one of the most common forms of poison in the world, booze. The first documented alcoholic beverage was a wine-like drink made from fermenting rice, honey and fruit. These days, there are, I mean, name however many, dozens, hundreds, thousands of kinds of alcohol, ranging from relatively low strength beers with a four or 5% alcohol by volume, up to a 96% alcohol by volume vodka made exclusively in Poland. More on that flamethrower fuel in a couple of minutes. Drinkable alcohol, which is tactically known as ethyl alcohol or ethanol, is different from most poisons that we think of in that instead of a slow and painful death, our bodies respond to this poison in fun and exciting ways. When we drink, our brains release dopamine and serotonin, which are the main happiness chemicals in our brain, which is why in addition to alcohol's sedative properties, drinking usually produces feelings of euphoria. Our inhibitions drop and we have fun. Alcohol has gained a reputation as a social lubricant, a truth serum, a way to relax and in many forms, it also tastes great. I think Ed's drinking sort of a watery beer right now.

It's a Coors Light, of course it is.

A Coors Light. I'm drinking a freshly brewed double IPA from Stone Brewing Company and it tastes great. It has tastes a little bit of tangerine, a little bit of pineapple, and I love all kinds of alcohol for that reason. Mezcal, bourbon, beer, wine, it all expresses different tastes and flavors in different ways from the same very simple, very basic ingredients. And I think there's something kind of nice about alcohol that connects us to cultures across the world going back centuries.

You hear that, sponsors? Hit us up.

Yeah.

That's the kind of copy we could be writing for you, and that's just off the top of the dome.

This is where I will say that I think one of my favorite beer experiments comes from a brewery called Dogfish Head in Delaware on the East Coast. They brewed a beer once called Midas Touch. I think they might actually still brew it once in a while. That they collaborated, not with another brewery, but with Goldschlager. No, with archeologists who had dug up mead, like jars of mead. I forget where in the world it was, but they had dug up these jars of mead and they had scraped the, not the resin, but like the leftover traces of alcohol from the inside of these mead jars. And they had figured out what the ancient culture had used to make that mead. And then Dogfish Head recreated that recipe and sold it as a beer called Midas Touch. They take pains to say it's not the exact formulation, because the exact formulation doesn't taste very good to the modern, to the modern tongue. Oh, no. But I think it's really cool that you really just take our wine is even simple. I mean, we've been making wine the same way for thousands of years. There's even a book that's well worth checking out if you're interested in the topic at all, a book called Drunk, about the way that booze has shaped humanity over the years. And I guess we should say we're not encouraging anyone to drink. Everyone should make their own choice about whether or not they drink. There's nothing wrong with being straight edge or not drinking or anything like that. In fact, we're about to get into a whole lot of reasons that you probably shouldn't drink because it's a very common way to get poisoned. And I think the science of alcohol poisoning is worth noting because it is so common. So usually, if someone is suffering from ethyl alcohol poisoning, it is from binge drinking, which the Mayo Clinic defines for a male as rapidly consuming five or more alcoholic drinks within two hours, or a female consuming four drinks within two hours.

That's it?

That's it. That's the definition of binge drinking, which can affect people differently, like depending on how much you weigh and how much food is in your stomach and how fast your metabolism is, you know, consuming five drinks in two hours. I mean, for most people, that'll put you on your ass.

Oh, yeah. It's not just like a beer. It's not like a Coors Light or something. If it's like an actual drink, like a cocktail, I imagine you're in trouble.

Yeah.

Did you ever watch Party Down, the original, not like the one they redid a couple of years ago, or like the legacy sequel from a year or two ago? I'm talking about like the original. When Ken Marino tries to drink the whole bottle of Jack Daniels or whatever, it immediately gets alcohol poisoning. And it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. Like, I quote it so regularly when he's just laying on the ground saying, call an ambulance, it's so funny to me. because he's just like, people are kind of ignoring him too. He's like, call an ambulance. Yeah, call an ambulance.

There is a college alcohol poisoning story I want to tell. I think it fits a little bit better a little bit later in the show. And it is somewhat reminiscent of Ken Marino's mistake in that show. But one of the reasons that alcohol poisoning is so dangerous, one of the reasons it's good that Ken Marino's character was saying to call on ambulance is that especially when you're binge drinking, you can consume a fatal dose of alcohol before your body and brain shuts down and you pass out, which means even after you're unconscious, your stomach and intestines continue to release alcohol into the bloodstream, which is filtered through your liver and broken down into dangerous by-products that can kill you while you are unconscious. It's not the actual ethanol molecule that's dangerous. Well, here's what's dangerous is Chris trying to explain chemistry. Oh, no. Never one of my better subjects. But as far as I understand, and there's probably someone in our audience who can tell us that this is wrong or whatever, but I think this is close to it. The by-product that ethanol is broken down into by the enzymes in your liver is called aceteldehyde, which causes cell and tissue damage, inhibition of cell repair functions, blocking of different protein synthesis, and can even trigger an immune response. On top of that, a large amount of oxygen is required to metabolize ethanol, which can result in low blood oxygen if too much alcohol is consumed, which can cause your heart to beat faster to try to pump more oxygen through your body, which can cause a whole host of other problems. So basically, ethanol when consumed in high quantities can cause a sort of domino effect laundry list of problems, which is why our bodies have so many different ways of trying to deal with it, like puking it out. But the problem with puking is that booze depresses your gag reflex, so the risk of choking on that vomit increases if you pass out. And even if you manage to get all of your puke into a receptacle other than your own lungs, you're still not out of harm's way, because vomiting can cause you to experience severe dehydration, which can lead to low blood pressure, you can experience seizures, hypothermia from low body temperature, and even brain damage that cannot be reversed. So booze as a poison, no fucking joke Ed.

Yeah, that's why I'm not going to drink to excess tonight or drink whole bottles of anything.

And on top of all that, of course, it's worth mentioning that this kind of poison is also physically addictive, meaning the body can become dependent on alcohol to function.

The podcast can become dependent on alcohol to function.

That's true, yeah. The podcast can become dependent on it. But if your body does, it's even worse because then you can't quit cold turkey. It can actually kill you. If you're an alcoholic, it can kill you to quit cold turkey because you can have seizures when your body doesn't get the alcohol that it has become physically dependent on. So all that to say, watch your drinking, especially, I thought this would be fun to do during the alcohol poisoning section of the show here. Watch your drinking, especially if you're sipping on one of the 10 most potent spirits in the world. Now I thought because I know Ed and because we have had party phases in college that I would have tried more of these in my day. I haven't. I'll give you a spoiler alert right now. It starts number 10 is Bacardi 151. So everything else on this list is stronger than Bacardi 151.

The thing that a lot of you probably use as the base of like Jungle Juice. Yeah, we're not even I mean, I guess some of you probably I'm sure we're gonna get to Everclear, which was also a pretty common base for Jungle Juice.

But yes, so this list comes from Food and Wine Magazine published September 19th, 2023. So it's possible that an even boozier booze has been produced since this list came out. But like I said, you know this list goes crazy because number 10 is Bacardi 151, which comes in at 151 proof or 75% alcohol. It's made in Puerto Rico and was discontinued in 2016. The article says that this famously flammable spirit was many people's first foray into dangerously high octane cocktails as well as flaming shots. As Bacardi itself notes on its website, quote, as a company, we care for our customers' health and well-being. And since there are so many other premium Bacardi rums to try, we felt it was best for everyone to let Bacardi 151 slink away into the night and transform into the shadowy creature of legend it has become.

That's the official copy?

That's the official copy.

Wow.

Yeah. If you've never tried 151, I guess you never will unless you find an old bottle.

RIP, God bless.

But again, just to put this list in perspective, the most drinkable alcohol on this list is referred to by its own makers as a shadowy creature of legend. So it gives you a good sense of how strong 151 was.

Yeah. Also, number 10 on the list was people who, yeah, their conscience got the better of them. They were like, listen, we were sitting around the boardroom going, what are we doing?

Yeah.

What are we even doing?

They retired this willingly.

Yeah.

I'm sure they made money off it. I mean, every college bar in the world has a bottle of 151 or did.

Now they have to replace it with paint thinner. Look at that spit take from Chris.

So spit take, number nine on this list is another rum. I'd never heard of this one. It's made in Jamaica, 80% alcohol, 160 proof, John Crow Batty Rum, B-A-T-T-Y Rum. Jamaican White Rum, the article says, may be familiar to you, but this one is ellipses, pause for effect, different. It's so strong that even the name serves as a warning. It's a reference to the John Crow Vulture, better known in the United States as the Turkey Vulture, whose diet of decaying meat necessitates a stomach of serious strength, just like this rum.

Wow. Wow, you know, crazy.

So first rum on the list, a shadowy creature of legend, second rum on the list, inedible even for Turkey Vultures.

And I love that there was a meeting where they were like, all right, how are we going to name this thing? Let's name it after this gastrointestinal miracle that is a Turkey Vulture. Like, you sure you don't want to call it survive if you can?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say it's, I guess it's sort of a, it's a veiled warning because most people aren't going to know what a John Crow Vulture is.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Not really in your face.

Future court case, we're like, we tried to tell them. They just weren't well read enough, you know?

Number eight, Balkan 176 Vodka. Proof, 176, 88% alcohol, made in Bulgaria. And as I would wager to guess, most alcohol made in Bulgaria is probably going to pack a punch. This article says, if you can find a bottle of this potent elixir, don't treat it as you would a more typical vodka. A classic martini, for example, would end your evening before it really even began, and likely put a serious damper on the rest of the weekend too. So one martini with Balkan 176 will fuck up your weekend.

Wow.

Not something that you want to have at a wedding, I guess.

Yeah, so Bulgaria, I'm sure we're going to get Siberian bum wine must be coming up next.

Yeah. Well, we are three drinks into this list, and we are at a one will ruin your weekend level of booze. Number seven, Pinscher Shanghai Strength Vodka, which is 177 proof or 88.8% alcohol.

They're basically saying that you'll get Shanghai if you drink this. That's the point of Shanghai level. Like whatever you said, Shanghai strength means your chances of being Shanghai go up to 100%.

I believe so. I believe so.

Wow. Wow. That's the name of it or that's what these idiots in the magazine wrote?

No, that's the name on the bottle. Pinsir Shanghai Strength.

Wow.

Now, interestingly, this is a vodka made in Scotland, which is not a place that I think of as like a real vodka heavy country. The article says, This Glasgow based eco minded makers of this botanical vodka say their powerful formula is intended to be used as a concentrate. Vodka concentrate. How's that for an invention? Wow.

I've been to Glasgow and like, yeah, if it was between Edinburgh and Glasgow, like Glasgow is a city that would make this.

A single bottle supplies 65 shots compared to the usual 26. The article notes, good luck finding it, however, a quick online search found a single source in the US and they're charging around $180 for a one liter bottle.

Here's a question. Is it provide more shots because you like, it would kill you to do whole shots like there's because the serving size is suggested to be half a shot or something. I suspect that's not Felix's magic bag. They're not going to have a bottle that just keeps pouring.

No, I think it's, I guess it's probably about you want to take about a third of a shot would be the strength of a traditional shot.

Well, let's hope somebody read the side of the bottle.

Yeah. Number six, Hapsburg. Oh, when you're naming something after the Hapsburgs, you're in really good company. Hapsburg Gold Label Premium Reserve Absinthe. This is 89.9% alcohol or 179 proof made in the Czech Republic. The article says Hapsburg's absinthe blend might not be the same version enjoyed by Van Gogh, the most famous of the absinthe drinkers, but rest assured it has inspired some quote artistic behavior. In a perfect world, you'd sip this with a bit of water slowly dripped through a sugar cube held by one of those gorgeous Art Deco spoons that were designed for the purpose.

Yeah, I've never had it, but I went to a party for a couple years in a row, like a Halloween party where the host did have a proper absinthe station where they would have the little flame and they'd have the sugar cube and they put it through that and strain it and everything. That was a pretty good, pretty cool experience.

Yeah, I had absinthe as far as I know, real absinthe, certainly the best tasting absinthe I've ever had. I had in Italy in a bar right at the base of Il Duomo, the Cathedral Dome in Florence. And it was prepared for me by a guy who at least claimed to have won some award in australia as bartender of the year. And I had two of these absinthe drinks that he made me and don't remember the rest of the night. So it was very good, but very strong. I don't know that it was Habsburg Gold label, but it was a good time. Number five, we're halfway through the list now. We're hittin the real high-strength shit. River Antoine Royale Grenadian Rum. 180 proof or 90% alcohol made in Grenada. Drawing from the centuries-old tradition of pot stilling, a slower, more flavorful method of distillation that occurs in a wide-bottomed and thin-necked still, as opposed to column distillation, this strong, clear rum can be sipped on its own. The article notes, slowly and not in great quantities, please. And also used to craft powerful cocktails. So another rum, not, you know, doesn't sound super exciting. I feel like at that point, when you're getting up to the 90% alcohol, I don't know what flavorful rum is in that you're just tasting booze.

It's interesting. I mean, what's your experience with, because I fucking love them, but I know it's going to ruin your life, especially as old as we are now. I love tiki bars, just love them, love tiki drinks. And every one of those drinks is just filled with a crazy concoction of insane rums and stuff. So it sounds like, this one sounds particularly like, I bet you it's in a bunch of tiki drinks.

Yeah, I think that's probably what it's for, especially because the next one, when they say craft powerful cocktails, one thing they don't say that it's used for is powering vehicles, which this next one can be used for. Number four, Bruchladich X4 Quadrupled Whiskey. 184 proof, 92% alcohol made in Scotland. Based on the 17th century method of quadruple distilling, Bruchladich X4 is billed as the highest proof single malt ever made. Asian new oak casks to enhance the flavor, again, I doubt it. The X4 can also, as proven by a pair of BBC journalists, power a sports car. It speeds over 100 miles an hour.

I'm glad it's got on top gear.

Yeah, but good luck finding it. This is a serious challenge to get your hands on, probably because they're fucking putting it in gas tanks.

Yeah, it's running a Siberian tractor right now. It's not for use of any other way.

Yeah, if you're just doing one third size shots of it, it probably would be around, but yeah, it's in a Siberian tractor and harvesting grain used to make more of it. Number three, Golden Grain, 95% alcohol, 190 proof, made in the goddamn United States of America from the same makers as Everclear, and nearly identical in constitution. Golden Grain is the key ingredient in drinks with names like The Screaming Purple jesus and Instant Death.

Okay, I'm glad you were so blasphemous leading into it.

Yeah.

So, got people going about this company.

Exactly, they're like, look, you're gonna take this first drink called Spit on the Grave of Christ, and then we'll follow that up with, you're dead. Here's a shocker, it's illegal in some states, just like Everclear, which is number two on the list. This is probably the highest proof liquor that most people have ever had, and it does kick around colleges. I was given some Everclear in college and told that it was a vodka shot, and did a shot of it, and almost vomited on the spot.

Everclear was a base, I used to live with a guy named Earl from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and he would use Everclear as the base of the Jungle Juice in our apartment in Alston.

Brutal, just brutal stuff. I mean, it is like drinking gasoline. It is intense. It's 95% alcohol, 190 proof. The article notes that it spawned a 90s alt rock band and many brutal hangovers. It's another one that should not be consumed on its own, much more smartly employed as a base for limoncello or other liqueurs, bitters as well. Interesting.

I do like limoncello, but if you ever have someone's homemade limoncello, which you can get from Italian friends or Polish friends, you got to sip those and be like, is this going to ruin my life? because it's kitchen without lemon on the front and you're like, oh, it's pretty delicious. But then you're like, what did you make this out of?

My aunt and uncle once brought back, they went on a vacation in France and they brought back some essentially bathtub booze from this French farmhouse where they stayed. And I remember it was Christmas and they had brought it out as kind of like, hey, isn't this neat? Maybe we'll make some drinks with it and nobody touched it. And so I poured some into some eggnog that I was drinking. I don't know, spiked eggnog's a thing, right?

Yeah, but with lemon flavored booze?

No, no, no, not lemon flavored. just, it was just like a bathtub.

Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

It was just like some, you know, and when I poured it into the eggnog, it didn't bubble, but it like reacted with the eggnog.

It just curdled immediately.

Yeah, it was disgusting. It was like, I don't know what it did or what it even was, but it was very strong and did not go really all that well with eggnog, so.

Yeah, sounds like it ruined it.

Number one on the list I'd never heard of before, and I'm going to mispronounce this because my Polish isn't very good, but number one is Polmos spiritus Rektifekwane, Rektifekwane.

You Polmos live, it wrecked your life.

Yeah. 192 proof, 96% alcohol made in Poland. The article says this Polish made vodka, the name translates to rectified spirit, is the strongest spirit for sale in the US. One sampler told the New York Post, quote, it's like getting punched in the solar plexus. So, strong enough to feel like you're getting hit. It's best employed as a base for liqueurs, infused with herbs of fuit. Not so much for drinking on its own, which the article notes is a terrible life decision. So there you have it. The 10 easiest ways to have ethyl alcohol poisoning.

To quickly get ethanol poisoning.

Yes. And if that's not enough for you, if you're like, you know what? I want to try something a little bit worse than ethanol poisoning. There are two other alcohols that can wreck you. They're both less likely to be ingested than ethanol, but sure, why not? Let's say you have a d***. Actually bleep that. We probably shouldn't introduce these things that can kill you by saying that. But there are two other alcohols that people are poisoned by, and they're both pretty miserable. There's isopropyl alcohol, which you probably know of as like rubbing alcohol, cleaning products, whatever. And then there's also methanol, which is a common ingredient in antifreeze, which goes in your car if you're not as much of a gear head as Ed over here. Paints and solvents.

Well, speaking of, am I crazy? Wasn't like, what was that booze that they were like, oh, it has fucking antifreeze in it. Fireball. Wasn't Fireball like taken off the market in every country but America because they were like, there's antifreeze in this?

Well, Google that. Fireball recall for antifreeze 2022. That's gotta be a fucking urban legend. There's no way. Well, okay. According to Fireball, whiskeys frequently ask questions.

Yeah, they are frequently asked questions.

Fireball is 100% safe to drink. It does not contain any antifreeze at all. And the suggestion is ridiculous. Sadly, this is the media's way of crafting headlines, but it's simply not true.

I mean, CBS News is the next article. Whiskey pulled over antifreeze ingredient, but not in US.

Well, I will say something I learned. Methanol is found in small doses in most alcohols. Now, let's see why it says, okay. So yes, Finland, Sweden and Norway pulled it off store shelves after finding it contained too much propylene glycol. And propylene glycol is in, yeah, here we go. In this article, it says it's been approved for use in the US in limited quantities. It's found in scores of everyday products from food to certain toothpaste. People are not getting poisoned by soft drinks or ice cream. It won't happen with Fireball either. The FDA allows about 50 grams per kilogram of propylene glycol in foods. Sazerac says it's Fireball whiskey uses less than an eighth of that amount.

All right, fine. I guess you're sucking around Fireball. You're trying to get that Fireball sponsorship, but I heard it and I'm not wrong. I'm not crazy. It was a thing that existed.

Not crazy. Not crazy. Well, let's start with isopropyl alcohol because that is something that sometimes kids are dared to drink or whatever. It's twice as potent as ethyl alcohol. Even three and a half to eight and a half ounces of isopropyl alcohol can be deadly to humans. So please don't drink it even on a dare. Symptoms of isopropyl alcohol poisoning include many of the same symptoms as ethyl alcohol poisoning, dizziness, low blood pressure, stomach pain, rapid heart rate, low body temperature, slurred speech, slow breathing, nausea, vomiting, unresponsive reflexes, throat pain or burning and coma.

My God, don't drink it kids.

Don't drink it.

Or adults.

There is a very funny story that there's a comedian, Ian Fidance has a very funny story about, he's sober now but there was a moment where he relapsed and he talks about how he ended up like drinking hand sanitizer on an airplane.

I saw people, so what was I doing? I was working in New Haven or something and there was hand sanitizer, this was during COVID, after COVID would have you, and there was hand sanitizer on construction sites, but they had to remove it every night because fucking lunatics would come and take the bags of hand sanitizer and they would pierce a hole in the side and drink it and they would pass it around like a fucking conch, like a conch cell.

Oh my God.

And they would drink and they would get fucked on hand sanitizer. You gotta really love being a drunk, I guess, to do that. Then to bring it home after that, to put it on the truck and bring it home when they're each day instead of living on the job site.

Well, for as much as isopropyl alcohol can fuck you up, the king of deadly alcohol is methanol. And that's because your body processes methanol differently than ethanol and isopropyl alcohol. Your liver breaks down methanol not into acetic acid, which is bad enough, but into formic acid, formate and formaldehyde, which listeners will remember from our Buried Alive episode as responsible for killing more than a few people who weren't quite dead before being buried.

I like that it's the body's like rip cord, where it's like, are you drinking what? Fucking pull the rip cord, let this guy die. Like there's nothing I can do for you, pal.

Yeah, you're done. Formic acid is deadly because it deprives cells of oxygen, so if you ingest too much methanol, you'll experience what Wikipedia describes, I think somewhat charitably, as a quote, a decreased level of consciousness, which sounds a lot like dying to me, but you'll also lose coordination, experience vomiting, abdominal pain, and blindness. And that thing about blindness made me pause because I've heard stories about people going blind from drinking moonshine.

Yeah, we've all heard that. That seems like it was ever present in like growing up. That was just synonymous with it.

Yeah, and so I was like, well, wait a second, is moonshine methanol or why do we people even make it if it's that deadly? So it turns out it's not a different kind of alcohol. Moonshine is ethyl alcohol or it's supposed to be. The problem is that most alcohol is made by fermenting sugars, right? So whether it's fruit or corn or whatever you're making your booze with, you're blending it with strains of yeast that convert that sugar into ethanol. The problem is that other strains of yeast that you don't want in your booze, just different strains of wild yeast have a different kind of enzyme that breaks the sugar down into methanol instead. So the danger of drinking bathtub booze or moonshine that's been fermented in an uncontrolled environment is that these wild yeast can be introduced accidentally and the resulting liquor can be deadly.

You got to close that door, man. A couple of wild yeasts can walk in, a couple of bad apples.

Yeah.

What you guys making in here? Something to kill a guy? And it's like, no. And it was like, do you want to?

When I visited my dad in Pahrump, Nevada, the hotel that he put me up at was a terrible hotel. And it was right next to a plaza that had two stores in it, a gun store right next door to a rum distillery. And the rum distillery took my wife and I on a tour of the distillation process. And they, I forget what they called it exactly, but it was essentially open vats of rum distilling, and they weren't covered or anything. And I was like, huh, that seems a little unsanitary. And they were like, it's the traditional way.

Yeah. Also, this alcohol is so aggressively high. It's like, it'll burn any germs that come into contact with it.

Yeah.

Or a wild yeast will jump in and be like, what are we doing? It was like, I don't know wild yeast, scram.

We've made a mistake, wild yeast.

Wild yeast is like, that's what I am. I am mistakes, baby. I am mistakes personified, and I'm here to help you guys lose your business.

Anyway, to bring this all back around to the numbers, the statistics, the hard news. The good news is that deaths due to alcohol poisoning decreased 16% since 2020 for a total of only 2,238 deaths in 2022. Alcohol poisoning deaths for males outnumbered those for females by 3 to 1. So even though women require less to binge, they die much less frequently. So Ed, when we talk about we've never been poisoned, you've probably had one or two near alcohol poisonings, right?

No. Even though I drank like Mad Dog and shit all the time, but I always knew.

I'm surprised Mad Dog wasn't on the list.

No, I don't think Mad Dog is that high. I think it's just a alcohol to cost ratio is incredibly good if you're a frugal drinker.

Fair.

But I don't think, no, I mean, the number of times I blacked out in college was, I don't know, never.

Yeah. Well, you and I both, I'm sure my in-laws are listening to this or my parents, and it is true that Ed and I are not really heavy drinkers. Ed's never passed out. I've never passed out. I've never even actually gotten sick.

Oh, I got sick. I got fucking sick. I threw up, I know this to be true because I can't quietly puke. I've talked about it in the show.

Yeah.

So I had always very self-conscious, but anytime I got sick enough where I was spinning and stuff, I was like, blah, like crazy loud, whatever all that noise is that Jesse loves.

I hate puking so much that I think it actually helped me have a healthier relationship with alcohol because I was just like, I will never drink enough to vomit.

Really?

Yeah.

I hate puking a bunch too, but it still led to a healthy relationship with my toilet bowl. I was hugging that thing all the time in college.

Yeah. Ed and I are responsible drinkers, but in college, and this whole story might get cut depending on how we feel about it by the Ed, because I don't want to make too much light of alcohol poisoning, but I did experience a friend's alcohol poisoning in college that was one of the most disgustingly memorable nights I've ever had. And reminded me that drinking too much is always a fool's errand. So this friend's name will get bleeped or we'll call him something else. He's doing fine now, by the way, so we can laugh about it. And this is a very, like I said, this is a gross story. So if you don't like gross stuff, if you don't like the top of the fear tier, let's say, maybe skip past it. There's chapters on this for a reason. So we all lived at this apartment in college. Ed and I have talked about it before. I don't know if we've talked about it by name, but it was a two-bedroom apartment that had four, sometimes five people were living in, six if Ed was sleeping on the couch that week. The living room was partitioned in two so that one half of the living room was a bedroom, and the second bedroom was also partitioned in two. I was basically sleeping in the closet of that room on a mattress on the floor. The kitchen was disgusting. There were holes in the stove. It was a mess of a place, but this one guy who lived with us, he was the hardest partier of the crew. And I had never really experienced heavy drinkers before until one night at college, this guy broke out a bottle of Jameson and started challenging people to see how long they could drink from the bottle directly, how many seconds. And he beat everyone at like 10 seconds or 11 seconds of just straight sipping whiskey. Not even sipping, slugging. And so Ed, I don't know if you were there, you weren't there for the end of this story. You may have been there for the beginning of this story.

I definitely wasn't there for the end, but knowing me, if I was there for the beginning, he'd be like, how many seconds? And I would, I just know me. I'd go, fucking none, passes to the next person. I have no interest in whatever this is. I just did this like two nights ago at darts. I still, I'm still that way.

We were at a party at Mr. Disclaimer's place.

Oh, I was extra drunk there when I broke that bulb with my head. I broke that light bulb because I got up on the kitchen counter or on the island. And then I went and I stood up right into a fucking light.

It might have been the same night, but this friend of ours starts drinking and by the time we're all ready to leave, he didn't want to go, but it was pretty clear that he needed to go. He needed help getting down the stairs. He was pissed off. He was accusing us of kidnapping him. We got outside and the T, the subway in Boston was closed, so we called a cab. And I remember he didn't want to get in the cab, so he threw his glasses into the street and said that he couldn't leave because he was blind. So it was dangerous for him to leave. So we got his glasses back and we get in the cab and the driver is like, don't let your friend puke in my car. And we were like, no, sir, like, please just get us home. So we keep our buddy upright. We have like a plastic cup from somewhere we were holding under his mouth just in case. And it's pouring, pouring rain, just downpour. And about five minutes from our apartment, he can't hold it in anymore. So we asked the taxi to pull over. He flops halfway out the door, pukes in the street, and the taxi driver is like, that's it, get out of the car. So we all get out, hiking through this torrential downpour, soaking wet. We get back to the apartment. We bring him up three flights of stairs.

Yeah, it was a walk up.

It was a walk up.

Every one of the places we talk about were walk ups.

Yeah. And we get him into the apartment, and he immediately starts puking again. So we get him to the bathroom, so he can puke in the toilet, and he gets angry. He starts swinging the plunger at us to keep us back. And he then threw the plunger out the window, because the bathroom had this like weird...

It was like a wall, it was like a window into like a shaft.

Yeah. Well, I think the building used to have a dumb waiter. Like it used to be someone's house, and then it was split into apartment buildings. So it was the dumb waiter hole. He threw the plunger down the dumb waiter, and sits on the toilet, puking, and then he starts shitting. He starts shitting and puking at the same time.

We call that walking like an Egyptian. And if you ever look how that dance goes, you'll better understand what I'm talking about.

Yeah, at this point, it's like three in the morning, and everyone is exhausted, everyone else is drunk, and everybody kind of heads to bed. But I was super nervous because I'd heard all these stories and dare about like if someone's puking, you don't want them to choke, you got to make sure they're okay. Don't make like, make sure they don't pass out. And the door to my bedroom slash closet was open directly across the hall from the bathroom. So I could basically lay in my bed and keep an eye on this guy and make sure that he was alive and he was okay. So I'm laying there with the bathroom door open and my bedroom door open, staring at a passed out guy covered in puke and shit. And every time I got up to see how he was doing, he'd shove me away. Eventually the sun started to come up and I passed out. When I woke up, I was like, oh fuck, I hope he's okay. He wasn't on the toilet anymore. We all checked, he was in bed, he was breathing, he was okay. He didn't get up until well into the afternoon. And we were all sitting in the living room watching music videos. And I remember we just hear him starting to stir and then he goes, oh, who's shit in my bed?

Oh no.

because he had dragged himself into bed covered in shit.

Oh my God, train spotting situation.

Yes, so he was the one who had shit in his bed. He was okay, but it was, I mean, he was alcohol poisoned. He couldn't eat for a few days. He had trouble keeping water down. Like it was bad and it was a real, you know, it was very funny and we laugh about it now, but it was a real like, ooh, this can go sideways real quick.

Well, those are the ages to do it.

Yep, yep. So anyway, enough about booze.

That's no way to end that stuff. Oh well, yeah, well, it happened. Anyway.

I don't know, it happened. He's alive, we're alive. Don't drink too much, kids. We're having fun, but you don't want to go through any of this. It's terrible. Drink in moderation, everything in moderation. But anyway, I guess I say anyway, because I suspect most people probably clicked play on this episode wanting to hear more about death and murder and killers and deadly poisons and assassinations.

Yeah, that's why I stuck around.

Yeah, so I found an article. You know, you know I'm a history head. You know I like diving into the background of these things.

Are you going to go in the history of Mr. Yuck? Are you going to get into Mr. Yuck?

No, Mr. Yuck does not make an appearance in this episode.

Oh, I'm glad I'm bringing it up then.

Although I do think Mr. Yuck would make a great piece of art for this episode. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's Mr. Yuck. I don't know if everybody has Mr. Yuck where they're from, but it was a sticker with like the poison control center, like phone number.

Right. And you would put it was a green face kind of making like a like, I'm sure there's an emoji that makes the same face as Mr. Yuck. And you put it on like rat poison or bleach or whatever to show kids like, don't drink this, don't eat this.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know. It's apparently it's out of Pittsburgh is where it started. So maybe not everyone got Mr. Yuck.

It was out of Pittsburgh.

Mr. Yuck is a trademark graphic image created by UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and widely employed in the United States in labeling of substances that are poisonous if ingested.

Huh, I did not know that about Mr. Yuck.

The Pittsburgh Poison Center was the first place to use Mr. Yuck.

So me and Mr. Yuck, Pennsylvania exports. Fantastic. Call me Mr. Yuck, because this boy is from Pennsylvania.

Yeah.

All right. So to start our discussion of deadly poisons used for murder and mayhem, I'm quoting here from an article in Popular Mechanics magazine published October 4th, 2020 by author Meg Neil. Poison has long been a murderous tool for emperors, pharaohs and kings. Around 1550 BC, Egyptians scribbled numerous recipes for poison in hieroglyphics into the Ebers papyrus, one of the earliest known medical documents. It's in fact the most extensive and best preserved record of ancient Egyptian medicine known with nearly 700 magical formulas, folk remedies and poisons contained within it. The exact source of the papyrus is unknown, but it was said to have been found between the legs of a mummy in the El Assisi district of the Theban Necropolis, which is either the best or worst place to find a mysterious scroll. Sounds kind of awesome.

Yeah, I do like that the scroll had folk remedies, medicine and poisons. Yeah, because it's just I want to see the like abacus of what did it do? Did it fix their leg? It killed them. And they just like slide the thing over to poison. Yeah. All right. What about next? What do they do? I don't know. They feel a little better. Folk remedy.

Yeah. Well, we'll get to some of that some of it in a bit, but it seems like a lot of determining what was poison and what helped you was pretty much that process. It was let's try a bunch of stuff and see what kills you and what doesn't. But this thing, the poisons in here are actually kind of boring, but it has some of the best spells and recipes this side of homunculi. So I just wanted to share a few ancient Egyptian medicine ideas from the Ebers papyrus. So for burn wound protection, it says to use a frog, warm the frog in oils, and rub the afflicted spot, or warm an electric eel's head in oil and apply that to the burn site.

Well, these are two animals who are going, what the fuck did we do? Leave us alone, where are you taking that frog?

Yeah, well, and an electric eel's head, it seems like they must have connected the idea of like a burn to the idea of the shock from an electric eel somehow, like one way or another, that kind of makes sense. But a frog...

The frogs are just, they've just done dirty all the time in this show. They're constantly like, putting a cauldron, like, we, what the hell, we want, we'll listen to something where like, frogs could help you with something, and I was like, there's no fucking way that's dumb. Like, russian.

Oh yeah. Yeah, it was the frogs keeping milk from spoiling for the russians.

Yeah, so frogs are getting tossed into all sorts of shit. It's like, I don't know, maybe a frog will do it. But I do wonder, is it a full electric eel that you just grab its little head and wipe it on there, or is it like, you gotta remove the head?

Yeah, unclear, unclear. I would imagine you would have to remove the head if you're gonna try to warm the head in oil.

Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure.

All right, so next on the list, a migraine cure. So check this out. Next time your head hurts, give this a shot.

Rub a frog on it.

Pop a frog on it. Put a frog in your mouth. No, to cure a migraine, you use a clay effigy of a crocodile with herbs stuffed into its mouth, firmly bound to the head of the patient by a linen strip.

Wow, there's no way you walk out of that feeling like this is not embarrassing for everyone involved.

The linen strip is inscribed with the names of Egyptian gods and this treatment was said to get rid of the ghosts and demons causing your migraine pain.

That is amazing. That is how long do I need to keep this toy of a crocodile on my head?

Yeah.

Until the ghosts leave, idiot. Why are you even asking me?

And it can take a long time, so be patient.

Well, I don't want to go to the bazaar like this or wherever they go in Egypt. I don't know.

So this next one, I can't imagine was a common problem, but it's a very complicated remedy to heal abnormal eyelashes, whatever that means.

Hey, the Egyptians, I mean, if Hollywood taught us anything, they have like serious eyeliner, right?

Yeah.

So maybe the eyelashes and like that type of stuff is important to the culture at the time. And so to the point where if it's abnormal and this remedy doesn't work, you gotta just draw some on.

Well, I suspect in this case by abnormal, they mean growing abnormally, like causing some sort of pain. Maybe it means ingrown, but the cure here is Christ Almighty. What a walk around the block this is. So you want to heal your abnormal eyelash. You combine myrrh, as in gold frankincense and myrrh, lizard's blood, bat's blood, and then tear out the hairs, the abnormal eyelash hairs, and put there on in order to make him well. So you're tearing out the hairs and then you're applying the myrrh, lizard's blood, and bat blood, then use a mixture of incense ground in lizard's dung, cow's blood, donkey's blood, pig's blood, dog's blood, stag's blood, calyrium, and incense to prevent the hair from growing back into the eye after being pulled out.

You're to remove the eye after all this shit goes on it.

You've had to kill an entire farm to prevent this one bad eyelash from coming back.

plus lizards.

Yeah, plus lizards.

Yeah, maybe just get some eyeliner. I don't know. Ignore it. This is crazy. That is the craziest thing. Like you were building, you're making homunculi in someone's eye.

Yeah, it seems to me, now look, I'm no ancient doctor, but they knew what saltwater was, and I feel like saltwater cures so many things. How did they not just decide, like, I don't know, drip some saltwater on that eyelash, instead of, you know, old McDonald's farm town massacre that you have to do?

Well, that's why the song is old McDonald had a farm, because they came and fucking killed everything on his farm and left him desolate.

There's nothing left.

just to fix that eyelash, dude. Yeah, that's outrageous. Holy shit.

My favorite incantation, though, that I found is to cure a stuffy or runny nose. The papyrus suggests the following incantation. Spit it out, thou slime, son of slime, grasp the bones, touch the skull, smear with tallow, give the patient seven openings in the head, serve the god Ra, thank the god Thoth. Then I brought thy remedy for thee, thy drink for thee, to drive away, to heal it. Milk of a woman who has borne a son and fragrant bread. The foulness rises from out the earth. The foulness, the foulness, the foulness, the foulness. And this is to be spoken over the milk of a woman who has borne a son and fragrant bread. And then you put that combination, I guess, it says put in the nose.

Wow. Okay. That's, I mean, son of slime.

Son of slime.

I'm never gonna not remember that. Like son of slime is maybe the best thing we've ever uttered on the show. But yeah, I don't know. This is a little bit like go out and do Four Hail Marys a little bit for me in terms of a, Claritin it is not.

No. Yeah. It's also sounds like sludge metal lyrics or something.

Yeah. Or like Egyptian beat poetry.

Yeah. Spit it out thou slime, son of slime.

Yeah. Everybody's snapping at it.

Yeah.

As they do the incantation.

Well, my nose is unstuffed, so something worked.

Oh my God.

So those are some of my favorite incantations from the papyrus. To continue along with the article, it's believed that the first known Egyptian pharaoh, Menes, experimented with deadly toxins, as did the last Egyptian pharaoh, Cleopatra, who supposedly took her own life with a poison asp, which is a kind of snake. Although, I would like to point out that listeners of the show know from our Spiders episode that there's no such thing as a poisonous snake. There are venomous snakes. poisonous refers to substances that cause harm when ingested or touched, such as toxic plants or animals, while venomous is the term used to refer to animals that bite or sting to inject their toxins directly into the body.

Well, maybe she had one that she rubbed and died.

Not to be pedantic, but I want to point out that you do learn something if you listen to this piss and shit filled show.

Yeah, and if you weren't listening, we'll remind you of the thing we said that you should have learned from.

Experimenting with poison also killed the father of Chinese herbal medicine, a guy named Shen Neng. Now, from what I could find, Shen Neng is more of a mythical figure than a real guy, but there is at least one book that's said to have been written by him. Not entirely clear what his deal was in terms of being real or fake, but I did want to share some additional details because at least the mythical version of this guy is crazy. So according to Mythopedia, Shen Neng was born around 28 BC, and it was clear that there was something special about Shen Neng from the day he was born. The most obvious sign?

That he didn't exist.

He was born with two horns upon his head and a transparent stomach.

excuse me?

So he was sort of like Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Well, no, Krang was just a brain. I think whatever the fuck Krang rode around in was this guy.

Right, right, right. Shen Neng also was said to have gained the ability to talk within three days of his birth. So take that, baby Einstein books. This guy, this transparent stomach man was gibber jabbering real quick, and he could plow entire fields by himself by the age of three.

Wow. He's like Bam Bam or whatever the fucking Flintstones character is.

As Shen Neng grew older, he realized that most of the people in his village were sickly, weak or starving, and soon came to the conclusion that it was because they subsisted on a poor scavenged diet of clams, fruit and the occasional bits of meat. Deciding to help them, he put his transparent stomach to use and began eating all the different types of plants around him to experiment with their effects on his body, which is big of him. But I don't really know why he had to have a transparent stomach to do that.

Yeah, that's just an upgrade, I guess.

Shen Nong then categorized the plants into three different groups. Superior plants, which were non-toxic and edible, medium, which were plants with mild ill effects, but with medicinal uses, and inferior, which were straight up poisonous plants. After taking a year to try hundreds of different kinds of plants, Shen Nong shared his findings with his neighbors and taught them how to farm, so they would have a steady source of nutritious food. Unfortunately, his luck ran out when he ate a particularly poisonous plant, the yellow flower of a weed, that caused his intestines to rupture in his see-through stomach.

What to say, guts are the best thing about having a see-through stomach, is people can go, hey, buddy, do you see this? Oh no! Yeah, you gotta go to a hospital or whatever the equivalent is.

You gotta invent medicine.

Right now.

Quick, that doesn't look good. As a reward for his selfless and heroic deeds, Shandong was awarded a place in the Jade Emperor's heavenly court. Now, I feel like he should, of course, he deserves that spot on the heavenly court, but I feel like he gets negative points because I don't think he wrote down which plant it was that burst his intestines. There doesn't seem to be record of what plant it was, and I feel like we should know.

Yeah.

It seems like that would be a plant that you'd want your farming neighbors to avoid.

Yeah, put up a do not touch sign. Yeah. Whatever the hieroglyph for that would just be like a stomach exploding on a little guy.

Yeah, and a guy with big wide bug eyes.

Yeah.

This feels like a good place to pause to go over some of the most common plant poisons in nature. I don't think any of them are the mystery plant that killed the see-through man, but they are important to know. So hemlock, big one, favorite of the ancient Greeks. Poison hemlock comes from a large fern-like plant that bears a dangerous resemblance to the carrot plant. It was readily available for treating muscle spasms, ulcers and swelling, but unfortunately causes paralysis and respiratory failure in large doses. Athens used it so much that it was the drug of choice for capital punishment, known as state poison. And I believe, was it Socrates had to drink hemlock when they sentenced him to death?

Maybe in that play you read.

Hold on, let's see, Socrates hemlock, I'm pretty sure.

Socrates.

Yes, Socrates was sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock.

The more you know.

Hemlock causes a frothing, spasming death. So not something that you want to eat. Although a lot of the poisons on this list cause frothing, spasmodic death. So don't touch any of them. The next one, this next plant, you might remember from, again, our homunculus episode, the Mandrake root.

Hell yeah, what's up Mandrake?

The Mandrake root is a somewhat human shaped root. Like if you pull it up, it kind of looks like, it's like thick and wire, kind of like ginger, but it does kind of have the shape of a person a lot of times. And it was used in homunculi recipes to create life, but that's not all it was used for. People also made use of Mandrake root as a sedative. It was a hallucinogenic and an aphrodisiac. superstitious medieval denizens believe that when the vaguely human shaped root was pulled from the ground, the plant gave a piercing shriek that would drive anyone that heard it to madness or death. So that's not something that I found out about in our homunculus episode. It seemed like it was fairly easily accessible, but if your plant was screaming when you pulled it from the ground, I guess that's bad news.

That's a red flag. It's how they do it in Harry Potter. When they pull them out, they scream.

Oh, really?

In Harry Potter, when they do like the potions class or the fuck they're in, where they have to like use Mandrake, when they pull them out, they scream. And if you don't have little ear things in, they can like, I don't know, kill you or something. I'm not sure.

I never read Harry Potter. Oh, well. just another reason that Ed is everyone's favorite host of this show.

Oh, boy. cause I'm sure we're gonna have a hundred people email and be like, it wasn't a potions class. It was fucking whatever.

The third common plant-based poison, nightshade. The main ingredient in witch's brews, or a main ingredient in witch's brews, a single leaf or a few berries of nightshade could cause hallucinations. And a few more would be a lethal dose.

Yeah. Nightshade. Remember I used to play that game that we talked about in the show, where I would be in your apartment, the apartment we just talked about, and I would stay all night playing Skyrim or whatever?

Yes.

Nightshade, when you were like, join the Assassin's Guild or whatever, like you would get nightshade to use on people.

Yeah. Nightshade, I think, was the first kind of mystical poison I became aware of. I remember I wrote a story. I don't remember what the story was about, but I do remember I wrote like a short story in fifth or sixth grade and I thought I was so cool for naming it nightshade. Like that was the main ingredient in whatever this thing was that the character was making. So it's a common popular poison used in lots of pop culture. I didn't know this though. Medieval women used the juice of the berries to color their cheeks and they would even put a few drops of juice on their eyes because it would cause their pupils to dilate and give them a lovestruck look. And that's why this deadly poison is also called Beladonna or beautiful woman. So, yeah. All right, Aconite is the next plant on this list. This toxic plant, also called Monkshood or Wolfsbane, was used by indigenous tribes around the world as arrow poison and was so deadly that growing it was forbidden in ancient Rome. In the Middle Ages, Aconite was one of the ingredients in a potion used by witches to give them the feeling of flying. So, I guess this also caused hallucinations.

Wolfsbane was also in Skyrim.

Well, look at this. You learn from the podcast. You learn from video games.

Anywhere but our crumbling school system.

And the final, easily, somewhat easily accessible plant poison, Strychnine. Derived from a bitter-tasting tree native to India, this toxin was known since antiquity in Asia and was used in many traditional medicines. It eventually made its way to the West in the 1700s, where it became a rat poison. Much like a lot of the other poisons on this list, a lethal dose causes muscle contractions and ultimately death by respiratory arrest. All these poisons were used in medieval times. And by Roman times, poisoning had become so rampant that an ancient Roman law called the Lex Cornelia was issued and it outright forbade toxic tinctures from being created. As with any attempt to make things illegal though, it only made the problem worse. Six Roman emperors met their end due to poison, including claudius, who was murdered by his own wife, Agrippina, to advance the position of her son Nero, who then turned around and poisoned his stepbrother in order to take the throne.

Yeah. I mean, Nero is a piece of shit, right? I mean, anybody who rises to power through illegal tincture use is probably a bad person.

Well, if all of his friends in school hadn't busted on him and called him Nerto, maybe he would turn into a better guy.

You Nerto.

Fucking Nerto.

Yeah. They called Caligula fucking Uncooliglia. I was trying to keep it as clean as Nerto was.

Those are all terrible jokes. But look, we're trying, folks. We're trying.

We're trying to stay awake.

No king was haunted by poison more than King Mithridates. Mithridates.

Mithridates.

No king was haunted by poison more than King Mithridates VI who ruled Pontos, which is modern day Turkey, over 2,000 years ago. This guy fucked himself. He was terrified of being assassinated by poison. This was not unwarranted because his mother had poisoned his father. So he grew up in the shadow of a pretty bad poisoning situation.

Sure.

Mithridates became obsessed with finding what he called a universal antidote. And according to this article in New Scientist, another article in New Scientist, this one from 2008, Mithridates systematically tested every known antidote on condemned prisoners.

Oh no.

So these poor motherfuckers are getting poisoned with one thing after another. And then Mithridates is like, here, try this. This is what I was talking about when I said it seems like most of this science was just like kind of trial and error.

Yeah, I'm assuming a lot of these guys didn't have trials until this was used on them.

Yes, true. He soon learned that while one particular remedy worked best against snakebites, another would be more effective against scorpion stings. And when it came to plant poisons, something different was needed to counter each of them. He spent years trying to establish which worked best. And then when he finally felt like he had a hold on all this, he combined each of these antidotes into a single universal antidote. Other people suggest that the Persian physician, zopyrus...

Wait, we're just gonna walk by that? We're just gonna cruise on by the fact that that guy got a fucking ice cream sundae of every scoop you can get and was like, we're good to go?

Well, no, no, no. So I'm saying that he combined them into this universal antidote. Some people suggest that it was actually a Persian physician named zopyrus who sent Mithradates the recipe and a prisoner to test it on. Either way, an ultimate antidote was developed. It included extracts from around 50 plants, a legless lizard, and musk.

Oh, these lizards, dude, fucking lizards.

These poor fucking lizards. And musk from a beaver's scent glands, which is one of the most disgusting phrases I feel like I've ever heard.

The only thing more disgusting than that is the person who was like, preceded it with, I got something for you.

Yeah.

Look, I got something for that. All right, don't worry. I'll be right back.

There's no way musk from a beaver's scent glands is pleasing to the scent glands of a human being.

Well, that's actually what Chanel No. 5 is.

Probably. In any case, this was all mixed into a palatable paste and flavored with honey. This concoction became known as Mithridatum, and Mithridates took it every day.

What?

In an attempt to build up immunity to poison. Now, I left out, there is a whole wild history of this sort of universal antidote became the backbone.

Alpha brain.

Yeah, it was gorilla brain supplements for the Middle Ages. Every king, every physician had their own version of it eventually. It was sold across the world, again, different kinds. People were obsessed with this idea that you could have this, I guess now it might be considered sort of a snake oil kind of thing. But back then, it was like they would create this cure-all basically from all these different plants and lizards. And to distill the research I did into this down into one pretty simple sound bite, let's just say the main ingredient and most of it was opium. It just made you feel good and or made you pass out and rest.

Yeah, there's something else in there doing the heavy lifting.

Yeah.

It's not the thing with the largest font on the front of the box, but it is really doing the work for you.

The heavy lifting.

It's doing the heavy lifting. It's a little wacky that this was used preventatively. It's like if I really didn't want to get sick with something that would require penicillin to fix it, I wouldn't take penicillin every day. Wouldn't I just take super small amounts of poison every single day to build up a tolerance to poison?

Yeah, well, that's what Rasputin did, right? I think Rasputin, at least in lore, the real Rasputin supposedly took what we would call, I guess, a micro dose of different poisons every day to build up an immunity to anybody that might try to poison him. But the ironic part, and I think this is actually the proper use of irony, is that eventually a Roman general named Pompey invaded pontus, which is the land that Mithradates was the ruler of. And during this invasion, Mithradates said, you know what, fuck it, I'm going to try to kill myself using poison. But he'd been so successful at making himself immune that the poison didn't work, and he had to ask one of his soldiers to run him through with a sword. So anybody out there who's thinking about trying to make themselves immune to poison, just be very sure that you aren't planning on killing yourself in battle that way.

How do you spell Pompey?

This Pompey is P-O-M-P-E-Y.

Yeah, so that's Pompey, actually.

The Roman general Pompey.

Yeah, and he's the one who, it was him versus Caesar in that civil war. With crossing the Rubicon and all that shit.

Oh yeah. Okay, Pompey, I was wrong.

I hate that I know that because it's going to, it opens me up to some kind of like your Roman Empire joke.

Well, here's what I'll be thinking about once a day for the rest of my life. The phrase Pompey and Circumstancy. Now, what's been put in my head is a meme only to myself. And then of course, there were the Borgias, who were perhaps the medieval masters of death by poison. If you're not familiar with the Borgia clan, I don't know why we would do a whole episode on them, but we probably could. There were a lot of them and they were all super fucked up and terrible people. The long and short of it, just so this next part makes sense if you're not familiar with the Borgias, is that they were a noble family. They were originally from Spain. They established roots in Renaissance Italy, and they threw a lot of cloak and dagger and bribes and murder, became prominent in religious and political affairs throughout the 14 and 1500s. The house of the Borgias produced two popes and a whole host of other political and church leaders, and they would do anything to hold on to power, including poisoning nearly everyone who crossed them. According to this New Scientist article, Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI, his son, Duke Caesar, or Caesar, there's an E at the end of it, I don't know, Duke Caesar or Caesar, and his daughter Lucretia are infamous for poisoning dozens of cardinals, bishops and nobles. Although, the article notes historians think Lucretia may have been wrongly accused, so.

Okay, well, the article is covering its bases.

Yeah, just in case the Borgia descendants file a lawsuit for...

Defamation of character or...

Defamation, yeah. Witnessing this state of affairs, the Venetian ambassador reported that every night, quote, four or five men are discovered assassinated.

Oh my god. Every night. Every night, dude. This is Venice in Italy?

Yes.

Well, you know there's an Italian saying, and I can never remember it in Italian, but essentially, it translates to in English, I hate that person and I hope they die tonight. And I think it's so funny, like the immediacy that like, there's just nothing in the English language that has that kind of urgency.

Yeah.

So I wonder if that, you know, just that was being said a lot in Venice during this time.

Yeah.

And then like those hopes became a reality.

Yeah. Well, there's actually, there's another famous Italian phrase that will come up in just a second. But the Venetian ambassador reported that every night, four or five men are discovered assassinated bishops, priests and others. So that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the duke. The family experimented with a bunch of the toxins that we listed already, strychnine, aconite, others. They experimented on animals and the poor and kept their vials in the basement next to their wines.

I don't love this. It always ends up these poor, poor people.

I know.

Always fucking getting. If you're a prisoner to low wages, actual prisoners and prisoners to low wages ended up getting experimented on in this world.

I will say, for all the flaws of modern society, generally, and I'm speaking very broadly, the poor have it a little better than they did during the Middle Ages when they truly were not considered human beings.

Well, yeah, we don't have a caste system anymore.

Well, we don't have a legal caste system.

Well, a recognized caste system, yeah.

But that's political. We won't go there. What's not political is that the Borgias eventually arrived at their own deadly formula known as Cantarella. Its contents are a mystery to this day, though it is thought to have been a mix of arsenic and blister beetles.

Oh my God.

Again, I feel like arsenic's probably during the heavy lifting. The Borgias modus operandi was to mix Cantarella into the wine of unfortunate dinner guests who would then turn up dead weeks or months later, a length of time carefully predetermined by the poisoner. This was so skillfully executed that the phrase, tasting the cup of the Borgias became a euphemism for a sudden or mysterious death.

Oh, wow. Wow, wow, wow.

So if you told that you wanted her to taste the cup of the Borgias.

Oh, no, I wouldn't say I would ever say that, but I would say, I imagine may have stood across from a coroner and said, I think these people tasted the cup of the Borgias. And they'll go, ma'am, you shouldn't even be in here.

Ma'am, please leave. You've poisoned at least one of our doctors.

Several of their pets.

Several of their pets. So I wanted to wrap up the episode by taking a look at five of the deadliest poisons currently known to man because we have developed some real shit-kicking poisons way worse than Cantarella, way worse than anything that people in the Middle Ages were using.

I mean, there's two I bet I can guess right off the bat.

Go guess. Give me your guess, Ed.

I'm going to guess Ryson.

Yep. It's one of them.

From Breaking Bad.

Yep.

And I'm going to guess cyanide.

Cyanide is actually not on this list, but cyanide is a real bad one. Cyanide is a deadly one. I will say we will tell you a little bit about these poisons. Researching them probably put me on a list.

Everything we do on this show puts you on a list.

Yeah. We're on enough federal lists already. So we're not going to share anything about where to find them or how to make them. And I will just say researching them alone was difficult because most of the publicly available information about these substances is fairly vague on purpose.

I bet. Yeah. You have to go to a weird website called askingforafriend.com or something.

Yeah. And I don't have a Tor browser to use the dark web. So first and foremost, probably no surprise, botulism, the deadly botulinum toxin produced by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum. This bacteria flourishes in low oxygen environments, particularly in improperly stored foods, which can include everything from vegetables like green beans, spinach, mushrooms, and beets, fish, including improperly canned tuna, even fermented, salted, and smoked fish, meat products, ham, sausage. You could grow this shit in just about anything, and it usually kills people by accident because they improperly preserve their food. There becomes a low oxygen content, and this botulism bacteria can spread like crazy.

Wow. It's the involuntary manslaughter of poisons.

Yes, and it's a bad one. So the toxin created by botulism blocks nerve function by preventing the release of acetylcholine, which is the chemical messenger essential for muscle contraction, which is why, and I only learned this recently, small amounts of botulism toxin are actually used in cosmetic procedures, where they're known as the brand name Botox.

No!

Botox is actually an insanely deadly poison. We just use it in small amounts because what it does is that when you inject it into your facial muscles to smooth out your wrinkles, what it does is that it blocks the nerve signal to those muscles, causing them to relax, and then your wrinkles go away.

That is crazy that someone was like, I gotta use for this shit.

Yeah.

And then someone was like, no way, Dave. And then he's like, hey, don't kill the chemical messenger.

So I looked it up.

That deserved more than it got.

The doses used in a Botox session are typically in the range of 20 to 100 units per session, depending on the area being treated. And those units are, again, this is where things get really vague, because obviously they don't want to tell you what amounts are deadly and not. But those units are very small amounts measured in nanograms. And comparatively to those 20 to 100 units, it would take about 2,500 to 3,000 units administered intravenously or intramuscularly to kill a person. So way below the lethal dose. But still, like you said, crazy that somebody was like, you know what we could use this for? One of the most deadly poisons in the world. Hey, you know, it's bad if it makes your entire body freeze up. But if it's just those unsightly wrinkles around your eyes, that's that's fine.

Yeah. Do you want to look young forever? Then use a little bit of this. Do you want to be young forever? Use a lot of this.

Yeah. Well, so check this out. If you were to be exposed to a deadly amount, if you wanted to stay young forever, your symptoms would appear within 12 to 36 hours. They would include fatigue, weakness, vertigo, followed by blurred vision, dry mouth, difficulty swallowing and speaking, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and abdominal swelling can also occur. The bacteria will then progress to weakness in the neck and arms, after which the respiratory muscles and the muscles of your lower body are affected. There is no fever, and importantly, no loss of consciousness, which means if you are suffering a fatal dosage of botulism toxin, you will remain conscious as your body stiffens and your lungs just stop working. You'll be overwhelmed by a fiery sensation that will start in your lungs as you suffocate and fill your entire body as you die trying to force your body to breathe.

That sucks.

It's real bad. Real bad. Make sure you properly store your food. Yeah, don't fuck around with food storage. If you ever watch Kitchen Nightmares and you see Gordon Ramsay go into one of the really poorly organized like freezers and he's like, it's raw. It's raw. You're going to kill someone. This is what he's talking about. This is why it's fucking raw.

I have my food handlers license, so I had to take all those classes about the danger zone and how long things can stay out. When you put stuff in the walk-in freezer, you have to make sure that things that don't drip based on what shelf you put them on and stuff.

Yeah. The second toxin on this list is as Ed guessed, ricin, which is extracted from the beans of one of the most common plants in the world, the castor plant. The oil that you extract from the beans of this plant is the same oil sold as castor oil. It can be used as a laxative, a wound treatment, a moisturizer. There's some research that suggests it can be used to cause a woman to go into labor if she's having trouble going to labor. It can be used for all kinds of things. And it's been used that way in folk medicine across the world forever. There's even mention of castor plant and castor beans in the Ebers papyrus that we discussed earlier, where we learned about son of slime. It's totally safe to use when heated to remove the toxins. When it's not, it can be insanely toxic. And a lot of cultures have been aware that something in the castor plant is poisonous because it has made people sick for just as long as it's been used as a tincture for laxatives or healing or whatever. And it really wasn't until the late 1800s that scientists started studying the castor plant to understand what was going on. And it wasn't until 1888, the first sample of ricin was created from castor bean extracts. And it was discovered that the poison contained within the castor plant is one of the most toxic substances on the planet.

Sure.

Now, this poison disrupts the body at the cellular level, inhibiting protein synthesis by deactivating ribosomes. So essentially, if you ingest even a tiny amount of ricin, your organs will begin to fail.

Shit.

That's what it does. It basically shuts your body down. It's a slow agonizing death, excruciating pain, violent vomiting, severe diarrhea, and one of the most famous instances of ricin poisoning was a bit of spy craft that occurred on September 7th, my birthday, 1978.

Yeah, you know, your birthday, what's December 7th is remembered for?

September 7th.

Oh. December.

Not December 7th.

Well, everyone now knows that I've been getting you a present on the wrong month.

No, you haven't. I think it doesn't matter. Ed has remembered my birthday, everyone. He's a wonderful friend.

Yeah, because of my Google calendar, not because of my ears.

On September 7th, 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was jabbed in the leg in public on the Waterloo Bridge in London by a man using a weapon built into an umbrella.

Oh great, the penguin.

Which fired a small pellet of ricin into Markov's leg. This guy suffered terribly for four days and died. The assassin was never caught, but I did find this interesting. In 2021, a Danish TV documentary made by journalist Ulrik Skott tracked down the prime suspect Francesco Galino alias Agent Piccadilly and interviewed him before he died a very lonely death in 2021.

At his circus.

No, not at his circus, alone in his apartment and they didn't find his body for a week.

Oh boy.

But I don't want to put dirt on his name and I haven't seen the documentary, but from the research I did, the doc seems to suggest that this guy killed multiple people. He was also a sexually deviant fascist, art thief and notorious swindler.

Ooh, we should watch the doc then.

I know, fun interview, probably not a real fun friend. Definitely not fun as an enemy, clearly. Then the third most deadly poison we know today, and I should say these aren't really in any particular order. I think there's some debate as to which of these are worse than others, partially because this third poison doesn't work as like a nerve toxin or anything. The third on this list is polonium 210, which is a radioactive element that emits deadly alpha particles and is considered by some to be the perfect poison because the radioactive alpha particles go undetected by radiation detectors, which most commonly just detect beta and gamma radiation. So if you just have a radiation detector, it'll slip by. It'll slip right by. The effects on humans are also difficult to diagnose, making it an unobtrusive and insidious toxin. And this shit is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. Most countries don't even have the ability to produce polonium-210 because you need to have a well-funded and well-staffed nuclear program. But just one gram of polonium-210 is enough to kill 50 million people.

Okay, we got to make sure that's, you know, really regulated.

One gram. One gram. A gram. That is nothing.

No, I get it. No, I mean, I've complained to drug dealers in the past. Like, this barely goes like a gram.

One gram could kill 50 million and additionally make another 50 million people sick. Once ingested or inhaled, polonium-210 ravages the body from within, causing catastrophic cellular damage. If you've ever seen the HBO show.

Chernobyl?

Chernobyl. There's a really great depiction of what happens.

It's fucking foul. I mean, it's a great show, but holy smokes. They do a good job of making that really hard to watch.

Yeah. Now, polonium poisoning in this case doesn't melt the flesh quite as much because you're not being exposed to as much of it. But the victim of a polonium poisoning will experience nausea, vomiting, hair loss. Your organs will fail. You'll be consumed by what is described as unimaginable pain. And even when treated quickly, death from multiple organ failures is almost inevitable. I found this really interesting. According to Al Jazeera, the first person believed to have died of polonium poisoning was Irene Joliot-Curie, the daughter of scientist and chemist Marie Curie, to whom the discovery of polonium is attributed. Like her famous mother, Irene Joliot-Curie earned her fame in science and shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with her husband in 1935 for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. Joliot-Curie spent her life researching radioactivity and other dangerous materials, but it came at a price because in 1946, she was diagnosed with leukemia after being exposed to polonium in an incident in which a capsule containing the element burst in her laboratory.

Oh my gosh.

She was sick for nearly a decade before she finally died in France in 1956.

I mean, what is it? Was it just radium, like the radium girls? That is, that's, I mean, that's radiation poisoning. It's different than just, which I guess you are describing radiation poisoning, but man, oh man, that is a sad story for a live episode or something.

Yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. I mean, a lot of people got pretty fucked by experimenting with radiation before they knew how dangerous it was. This poison though, polonium-210, was also famously used in another bit of spycraft to take out Aleksandr Livonenko, a russian secret service agent turned dissident who was living in exile in the UK. He was a long-time adversary and target of Vladimir Putin, and he died in London on November 23rd, 2006, after 22 agonizing days of radiation poisoning. He'd fallen ill earlier that month shortly after a meeting with two former KGB agents in a bar of London's Millennium Hotel. Litvinenko was taken to the hospital and initially suffering from severe diarrhea and vomiting, and doctors thought he had a stomach infection at first until his condition worsened, his white blood cell count plummeted, and he became susceptible to infection. John Emsley, writing in Molecules of Murder, which includes a chapter on polonium poisoning, he wrote that Litvinenko's skin turned yellow, indicating liver dysfunction, and he was tested for two of the most likely causes, hepatitis and AIDS, but neither was the case, and then his hair began to fall out, which is what tipped doctors off to the fact that something else was amiss here.

Wow.

Once they decided that he was suffering from radiation poisoning, then they tested and identified polonium as the culprit, because it's difficult to diagnose, because it kind of disguises itself as-

Looks like Kuru.

Yeah, looks like Kuru, looks like AIDS, hepatitis, but once you test for those alpha particles, they aren't hard to find. And one of the really scary things about polonium-210 is that it doesn't just affect the target. I don't know if anybody remembers when this all went down in London, but sites across the city were shut down, because when they realized that he'd been poisoned by polonium, people started investigating to figure out where else in the city of London, there were still radioactive traces of polonium that could be deadly to anybody who spent any time in its presence.

It's like a Mission Impossible plot.

Yeah, basically. And in this case, polonium 210 or traces of it, was later found at a number of London sites, as well as two British Airways planes that had flown the mosque out of London route. And traces were also found in the hotel room where his assassin stayed. So much of it was found in the hotel room that investigators think, and this sounds like a scene out of a Coen Brothers movie, that the pair of assassins might have accidentally spilled some of the liquid containing the polonium in the room and tried to clean it up.

Oh my god.

because they found it all over the room, they found it in the bedsheets, and then they found it in bedsheets that had been thrown into the laundry chute.

Oh my god. So you know that polonium was like, had a little bit of tap water in that vial, because they were like, we got to make it look like the same amount we had when they gave it to us. You know how expensive this shit is?

Yeah.

And it was like, you fucking goofball, you idiot. You spilled polonium all over the place. Like, I tried to clean it up.

Yeah.

And it was like, what? That isn't really funny like Coen Brothers scene.

Well, in total, hundreds of readings were taken from 64 locations in England and Germany. And they all kind of added up and told the story of this deadly international plot, which many books have been written about. And we will leave it to you, dear listener, to do your own research if you want to learn more about the Lippinenko poisoning. There's two poisons left on this list. Both of them are animal toxins. The first is Tetrodoxin, which is a venom found in pufferfish and certain newts. And I believe the blue-ringed octopus, which I just saw a video today on Reddit of a person picking up a blue-ringed octopus by hand and then posting it on Reddit as, can anyone identify this animal?

And that is an animal that's like poisonous in the sense that you can't touch its skin.

Well, it is, actually, I guess I might be wrong here, so.

I was trying to wonder what about this surprised you or shocked you, I'm guessing. Unless you said that he picked it up and then threw it as far as he could. No, the net, that's shocking.

The blue-ringed octopus is one of the deadliest animals on Earth. If it bites you, you pretty much are dead because the places where it lives in the tide pools of I think australia.

Of course it does.

Are so far from any hospital that if it bites you, you will not get to a hospital in time.

What's it gonna bite you with? Does it have one of those little beaks?

It has a tiny-ass little creepy octopus beak, but it's so small that most people don't even feel the bite. So they don't know that there's anything wrong until they're basically dying. It is the most poisonous animal, or one of the most poisonous animals on Earth. If you ever see, we should just say, with these next two toxins, any sort of brightly colored animal that makes you go, wow, what is that? Don't touch it.

Well, that's like your frogs are brightly colored, because isn't that like a point? Like they're brightly colored because of their poisonous nature?

Yes, yes. And we're gonna get to that in just a second here.

Well, I have a quick question for you. So you said that if it bites you, you're in trouble, but isn't biting the toxic thing and touching is the poison thing?

Hold on, now I've got myself all turned around.

because you said it's one of the most poisonous animals, but then if it bites you, you only have a little bit of time to go somewhere.

venomous is the term for animals that bite or sting. So yes, the blue-ringed octopus is venomous, which is the venom here. The tetrodoxin is found in puffer fish and certain newts and I'm pretty sure the blue-ringed octopus. This toxin works by blocking sodium channels in your nerves, which halts normal nerve function, which means that when it sets in, you feel a paralysis that begins in your extremities and moves inward, slowly robbing you of your ability to move, speak and eventually breathe.

Oh, I hate that.

Which means your heart continues to beat and you remain conscious, your mind remains lucid as you are trapped in a paralyzed body and die an excruciating death by asphyxiation. So don't touch brightly colored animals. just don't do it. The last poison, the poison most near and dear to my heart, the deadly toxin found in the skin of poison dart frogs, Betraco toxin. It is the poison found in the golden poison dart frog, Phyllobates terabilis. This toxin works sort of the exact opposite way as tetridoxin, but no less deadly. This one keeps sodium channels open in nerve cells, causing uncontrolled nerve impulses, which sounds almost more painful. You'll experience if you ingest this, or if it's shot into your skin on the tip of a poison dart, you'll experience severe muscle and nerve damage resulting in intense pain and convulsions. Paralysis sets in rapidly affecting the muscles needed for breathing and the heart. Death is a merciless end brought on by cardiac arrest or respiratory failure as your body is overwhelmed by the relentless assault of the toxin.

That sucks, man. Those are two. Where do you find this frog? Where's this frog live in?

It is endemic to the rainforest of Columbia.

Okay. So I'm not, yeah, stay out of there. Stay out of fucking there, dude.

Yeah. In general, the rainforest of Columbia, I think, are probably pretty dangerous.

It's interesting about this episode, a lot of instances of the word gold. For real, there was one or two of the boozes had gold in it. This is a golden frog. There was another gold thing. Yeah. I feel like if you ran this episode back and drank every time gold came up, you'd probably get a little drunk.

Probably. I should note that the golden poison dart frog has a couple of different morphs. So there's yellow, which is the most common. There's also a mint green, an orange and an orange version with black feet.

This is fucking Pokemon.

The blackfoot morph, I'm pretty sure, is just a captive bread line. I don't think they exist in the wild. That's something that happens a lot in poison dart frog husbandry. There are people who will try to breed very specific, very beautiful morphs of these dart frogs that you can't find in the wild, but that make absolutely gorgeous pets. Again, if they are born and raised in captivity, they are not poisonous. Their poison is derived from the bugs that they eat.

Oh, why aren't we talking about that? I think you have in the past, but why aren't we talking about these bugs, the heart of the poison that exists? We got bugs out here who are just like, eat me bro and literally evolve into another more insane creature?

Well, the bugs themselves, I don't believe are poisonous. I think when they eat the bug, there are alkalides in the bugs that the frog's body breaks down into the particular toxin that makes its skin so poisonous.

So crazy you can be like, oh, I'm on a pretty healthy diet of these bugs. And how's that going for you? I've never felt more dangerous, honestly.

Yeah, I wonder if we could eat those bugs and then we could be toxic.

Oh my God, I'm not doing that for, you're not gonna even find that in premium guys. That's not happening.

That's not happening, it's not happening. So yeah, the Petrachotoxin, the average wild golden poison frog is estimated to contain about one milligram of poison, which is enough to kill between 10 and 20 people, or two African bull elephants. So they are wildly poisonous in the wild.

Geez Louise.

You got to be very careful. Don't handle them and then rub your eyes, sort of like jalapeno peppers.

Yeah, that would be the shortest. Like if they made a YouTube channel, that's like hot ones, but for this, it would be just the shortest. It would be like, there would be no return guests.

No, nope. They would, in fact, they wouldn't even finish the episode.

No one gets to the part where they can promote their thing. They're there to do.

Yeah, it's just, they're gone. But with that, we come to the end of our episode on poison. And that means that we have to climb the fear tier. Ed, where are you placing poison on your personal fear tier?

It's pretty high. It's pretty high. Not like, I think it's high because poison can come at you in a lot of different ways. It can come at you from the like poison tipped blow dart of a person in the jungle. It can come at you from a jungle animal. It can come at you from the water with one of these fucking cartoon octopuses or octopi you described. It can come at you from a loved one, from a political opponent. Like it's just poison is out there and it's got to be regulated. And I think it is. And that's why you're going to probably jail for looking all this up. So we're going to have to do like a GoFundMe to get you out of jail.

You just hear like a knock on the door.

And so, yeah, I think it's like weirdly more present in society. It can come at you from like the puffer fish or hasn't been properly cut like that Simpsons episode.

Yeah. And that's a real thing. I didn't put it in the episode, but that is a real thing. That if certain species of puffer fish are not properly prepared, they can be deadly.

So I guess poison is actually more ever present in our society and we're more susceptible to it, including just mistaking vodka for Everclear or like a kid grabbing a bottle of what they think is juice and it's bleach. Yeah, so I guess it should be high for how much it's around us. And you might go, hey, I'm not going to drink a bottle of isopropyl or whatever.

Isopropyl alcohol, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not going to drink a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. But I'd also be like, hey, did anyone put anything in my drink?

Yeah.

Did anyone put some isopropyl alcohol? Did he put some Vizin in my drink so I shit my pants later? Or whatever the hell that might be. It's an urban legend. I don't know. But yeah, so I guess it's pretty high in the sense that like, yeah, it's out there and it's coming for you. It's up to you to take a universal elixir every single day for the rest of your life.

Take your Mithridatum, people. Take your Mithridatum. We should start selling that on the show.

Oh my God. Scared All The Time branded Mithridatum?

Yeah.

What about you?

No, a poison I think is fairly high on my list as well, on my fear tier. I don't have a great fear of anyone I know trying to poison me for reasons of not liking me.

Yeah, you don't have a Voccola lives next door to you.

That's true. I'm pretty good about storing food, but I would say botulism toxin is definitely way up on my list now because I mean, who knows how many restaurants, friends, relatives improperly store food. You just have to fuck it up once, you know?

Yeah. Do you have any friends who won't eat something anymore because they got really bad food poisoning once from it? Like I have friends straight up who were like, I'll never eat sushi again because I had like the worst night of my life from food poisoning from a sushi place or I can never look at a hot dog again because I ate something and it got me so, so sick.

Kind of. As you know, I don't eat pork or beef and that actually started while I do, you know, there's a little bit of a moral thing in that, in that I feel like pigs in particular, but pigs, mammals, cows, you know, they're sentient, they're smart. A lot of pigs are as smart or smarter than dogs. Feels weird to eat them. But the way that all started was in college. Do you remember Bennigan's?

Yeah. Hell yeah, dude. I think it's gone now.

Yeah. Well, probably because they were poisoning people. I had a Bennigan's, it was like a Guinness Glaze burger or something.

I remember, I feel like you ordered that particularly a lot.

I loved those things and one of them made me violently ill. And I stopped eating hamburger, which was my main source of beef or red meat. And then by the time I moved out to LA, it was really easy to get either straight up vegetarian or pescatarian or chicken or turkey. And I just sort of phased out red meat. Mostly, I don't still think of red meat as like, oh, food poisoning, I'd never have a hamburger. But that was how it started, was I just stopped eating it for so long that it wasn't much of a sacrifice to be like, just not gonna eat it anymore.

Okay, sure. Meanwhile, I came to see you when I got out of the dentist and I rewarded myself with a McDonald's cheeseburger, which I always do after a successful dental work. I don't have these phobias you have, these burger phobias.

Well, I mean, I think we've talked about this before, but I also, I'm of the mindset that I don't wanna support factory farming, although of course, you know, chicken and turkey are factory farmed. I try to avoid it, but it is what it is. But generally, my anti-red meat stance, I also feel like you only live once, and should I ever have the opportunity to try elk, bear, alligator?

Human being.

Well, I draw the line at people. I draw the line at cannibalism. But any other kinds of red meat, I would try, assuming that it was being killed and prepared, but probably not for me exclusively. But yeah, I would try others. I just feel like the, if you ever drive up the five past some of the factory farms in California, that was the other thing that did it for me. Once you drive past one of those farms and you see how many fucking miles of cows in pens that they can't even move, move.

Stop it.

It truly is just disgusting. It's disgusting on like a humanity, a humane level, and disgusting on a physically disgusting, why would you even eat that meat? It's being raised in just pure filth.

Also, there's no amount of buttons in your car to block off the outside air that won't just-

And the smell.

It'll still just smell so bad. Like for that entire stretch you're driving.

Yeah.

It's like that in parts of Texas and stuff I drive to where you drive. Anywhere you drive by one of these really large factory farm places, it just reeks.

Yeah. Well, Ed, we've conquered poison. We will start microdosing Mithradium or whatever the fuck. And we'll survive for next week when we will bring you another tale of something deep and dark and scary that keeps us up at night. But until then, this has been Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we will see you next week. Bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is A*****.

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We are in this together. Together. Together.

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