WTF Were They Thinking?! Dumb Ideas From History to TikTok

0:01 Roger, Charlie, we're ready to rock. In 1932, a man named Even Byers, champion, golfer, socialite millionaire, died with his jaw literally falling off his face. His bones were so radioactive they glowed in the dark. His crime? Following doctor's orders.

0:29 He'd been drinking radathor, A wildly popular tonic made of radium and water prescribed for vitality. He drank 3 bottles a day for years. The Wall Street Journal ran his obituary under the headline. The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off. Fast forward 93 years later. Millions are blending oats, water and lime juice into a sludge called Oatssempic 321, and they're convinced it's the shortcut to rapid weight loss. Different sensory, same delusion. Here's the uncomfortable truth. Humans don't get smarter about scams, We just get better at repackaging them.

1:19 We've swapped radium for fiber, snake oil for influencer codes. But the psychology? Identical authority gives us permission to suspend disbelief. Desperation makes us volunteers now. This episode isn't about laughing at our ancestors. It's about recognizing that we are them, just with Wi-Fi. Today, we're diving into history's most catastrophic ideas and holding them up next to the Wellness fads, tech hype, and cultural manias we're currently buying into. It's part of. Rock'n'roll. Because if there's one thing humans excel at, it's making the same damn mistake, but in a slightly different font.

2:07 So let's start with medicine, Because nothing reveals humanity's capacity for confident idiocy quite like the history of healthcare. For over 2000 years, from ancient Greece to the 19th century, if you showed up with a headache, fever, infection, or basically anything, the prescription was the same. Drain your blood. The logic Your body's humors were out of balance, and blood was clearly the problem. Leeches. Lancets. Scarification. Pick your method of controlled hemorrhaging. George Washington, 1st president of the United States, died this way in 1799, suffering from a throat infection.

2:56 His doctors bled him four times in 16 hours, removing nearly half his blood volume. He was dead by morning. One of his physicians later admitted they might have killed him, might have the punchline. You'd walk in tired and walk out anemic. Problem solved. But here's what makes this so relevant. Bloodletting wasn't fringe, it was mainstream. Respected doctors, medical schools, centuries of consensus. The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, is literally named after the blade used to open veins.

3:38 This is what happens when authority replaces evidence, when tradition becomes unquestionable, when people feeling better from lying down and resting gets mistaken for proof that the treatment works. Sound familiar? Because today we call it Wellness. Juice cleanses to flush toxins. Your liver and kidneys already do this, by the way, for free activated charcoal to detoxify. It doesn't, unless you've been poisoned in the last hour. And ionic foot baths that turn brown to prove they're extracting heavy metals.

4:15 They turn brown because of rust and sweat. But sure, let's call it science. The mechanism changes, the grift doesn't. Now let's talk about the lobotomy. Because if bloodletting was misguided, this was malicious. In 1935, a Portuguese doctor decided the best way to treat mental illness was to sever connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex. So by the 1940s, this procedure, often performed by hammering an ice bake through the eye socket into the brain, became the trendy solution for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and in some cases, just being an inconvenient woman.

5:00 Over 40,000 Americans were lobotomized. The inventor won the Nobel Prize in 1949. Meanwhile, patients were left docile, emotionless, cognitively destroyed. The cure was behavioral compliance. If you can't feel despair, well, you simply can't complain about it. One survivor, Howard Dulley, was lobotomized at age 12 because his stepmother found him difficult, he later wrote. I've spent my whole life wondering what I lost in those 10 minutes. Lobotomies weren't experimental fringe medicine. They were celebrated, performed in state hospitals, private clinics, even mobile lobotomobile vans endorsed by the medical establishment, marketed as progress.

5:50 Why? Because it was fast, cheap and solve the problem. Administrators cared about unmanageable patients. It didn't cure mental illness. It erased personhood and before you think, well at least we'd never fall for that again, we're living through the pharmacological version right now, over prescription of antidepressants to children. Off label use of stimulants is productivity hacks, the pathologizing of normal human emotions so they can be monetized. The lobotomy didn't go away, it just learned to wear a lab coat and use a prescription pad.

6:29 May I have your attention, please? What bloodletting and lobotomies share with radium water, with Ozempic, with whatever's trending on Medtag this week is this. We're so desperate for control over the uncontrollable that we'll accept solutions that don't work, or worse, that actively harm us, as long as someone with authority says it's fine. the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire nailed it. In the 18th century, the. Art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease. Sometimes the amusement kills you.

7:05 Now, we don't want to admit that we don't know. Doctors didn't bleed patients out of cruelty. They did it because doing something felt better than admitting helplessness. We lobotomize people because ambiguity is unbearable and control is absolutely seductive. And today, well, we buy a hack supplement stack and microdose our way through existential dread, calling it optimization. We've just gotten better at making ignorance look like expertise. But medicine isn't the only place with perfected confidence.

7:39 Stupidity. Let me tell you about the time corporations convinced us to literally poison ourselves and made billions doing it. So you survived the medical disasters. Congratulations. Now let's talk about the consumer products that were actively trying to kill you. Except this time you paid for the privilege.

8:01 In the 1920s and 30s, if a product didn't contain radiation, it was practically unsellable. Radium was marketed as a cure for hair loss, Impotence, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, rheumatism, gout, sciatica, nephritis and anemia. Basically, if you had a body, radium could fix it. Doormat radioactive toothpaste produced in Germany contained thorium and promised whiter teeth through literal atomic decay. Why settle for fluoride when you can glow in the dark? There were radium infused beauty creams, soaps and even bars of chocolate.

8:38 So radiacosmetics became wildly popular in Paris, with ads showing a luminous blonde woman bathed in visible rays of radioactive light. The original influencer glow up, except she was probably dying of bone cancer. The thing is, people loved it. Radium represented modernity, science, progress. Marie Curie had won two Nobel prizes. If radiation was good enough for her lab, surely it was good enough for your face cream. Never mind that Curie herself would die of radiation related illness. That part was not in the ads.

9:16 And here's where it gets darkly funny. These products from the 1920s up to the 1940s, toothpaste, hair cream, cosmetics, even suppositories are now collectibles among hobbyists. You can buy a piece of radioactive quackery on eBay today, a relic of when capitalism convinced people to rub poison into their skin for beauty. Now, before you feel too superior, let me ask what's in your supplement cabinet? Collodial silver that turns your skin blue. Activated charcoal with 0 proven benefits. CBD oil that might work but probably just makes you feel like you're doing something in ashwaganda because a Wellness guru said so.

10:03 The supplement industry in the US alone is worth over $50 billion annually. It's largely unregulated. The FDA doesn't verify claims before products hit shelves. You're buying blind faith in a bottle. Same as the radium chocolate buyers, just with better Instagram aesthetics. But if you want a real villain origin story, let me introduce you to Thomas Midley Junior, the man who poisoned the entire planet twice in 1921. Midley was a chemical engineer for General Motors, tasked with solving engine NOC.

10:39 That, you know, pinging sound that the engines made under stress. After testing options, Mitchley discovered that Tetrathil lead as a fuel additive virtually eliminated NOC and increased engine performance. Perfect solution, right? Except lead is one of the most toxic substances known to humanity. There is no safe level of exposure. It causes brain damage, developmental impairment in children, kidney failure, and just, you know, the mild death. Migli knew this. The discovery gave me the severe lead poisoning and workers at the production facilities were dying or going insane from exposure.

11:23 So what did mainly do well? He held a press conference where he poured tetrothal lead over his hands and inhaled its vapors for 60 seconds to prove it was safe. He then spent months recovering from lead poisoning. The man literally poisoned himself to sell a lie. Leaded gasoline first went on sale in Dayton, OH in 1923. Let's just give a clap to Ohio. And eventually spread throughout the world. It wasn't phased out in the US until the 1970s, and globally, some countries still used it until 20/21.

12:00 For nearly a century, every car exhaust pipe was a lead distribution system, coding cities, playgrounds, and lungs. The result? Generational brain damage. Studies estimate that leaded gasoline exposure reduced the IQ of everyone born before 1990 by an average of two to three points. Some researchers argue it contributed to spikes in violent crime in the 70s and 80s. Lead literally made societies more aggressive. And the punchline? Well, it made GM millions of dollars. Midley got rich, got awards, got celebrated as an innovator.

12:38 Meanwhile, the atmosphere filled with neurotoxins and children ate paint chips because lead tastes sweet. Here's the phrase I want you to sit with Dr. Smooth die smooth because leaded gasoline wasn't an accident, it was actually a choice. Ethanol could have been used as an antinock agent. It was cheaper, renewable and non-toxic. But you can't patent ethanol. You can patent Tetrathil lead. So corporations picked poison over people, profit over public health and called it progress. Sound familiar?

13:14 Today it's PFAS in drinking water, microplastics and breast milk. Glyphosate in cereal. The chemicals change, but the calculus does not. What radium, toothpaste and lead of gasoline share is This authority plus marketing equals mass delusion. No one forced people to buy radioactive chocolate. They bought it because scientists and advertisers told them it was good for them. No one held a gun to General Motors head and said poison the atmosphere. They did it because it was profitable and regulators let them.

13:48 And we're still doing it. We're just better at branding now. Clean coal vapes are safer. This AI is unbiased. Same script, different century. We are always living in the era where future generations will look back and say how the hell did they not know? Except we do know. We just don't care enough to stop. Don't give me attitude, Sir. So not all stupid ideas come from corporations or quack doctors. Some of the most enduring, most destructive ideas are the ones we do to ourselves, and we call it culture.

14:26 From the 10th century until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Chinese women had their feet tightly bandaged to alter their shape for aesthetic purpose. The process usually began when girls were between four and six years old. It involved breaking girls toes and arches and binding them to the sole of the foot with cloth to create tiny golden Lotus feet. Let me be clear about what binding means. Bones were snapped. Toes were folded under and crushed against the sole. Feet were wrapped so tightly that circulation was cut off, sometimes causing necrosis and dead, rotting flesh.

15:08 Girls screamed. Mothers did it anyway, because this was the path to marriage, to status, to survival. By the 19th century, it's estimated that 40 to 50% of all Chinese women had bound feet, rising to almost 100% among upper class Han Chinese women. For 1000 years, this was normal mothers who loved their daughters, broke their bones and told them it was beautiful. And it worked. Men fetishized the walk, a kind of swaying, helpless gait caused by standing on mangled feet. Tiny feet signaled that a woman was too elite to work, too refined for labor, too valuable to walk unassisted.

15:51 It was a status symbol forged in childhood agony.

16:02 Now, if you're thinking, well, at least we don't do that anymore, let me ask you a few questions. How many women do you know who've had cosmetic surgery they didn't medically need but felt socially required to get? I know you don't like this question. And how many teens are on weight loss drugs risking serious side effects because thin is currency Practice breaking. The law lighting up. Pathways and how many people are one bad scroll through Instagram away from hating their own face? We don't bind feet.

16:42 We Botox foreheads, fill lips, sculpt ABS and filter reality until we're unrecognizable. Comparisons have often been drawn between foot binding and the modern day wearing of high, uncomfortable shoes by women. But it's bigger than shoes. The mechanism is the same. Culture normalizes pain if it equals status. We've just outsourced the breaking to plastic surgeons and pharmaceutical companies. You can't say no. Now let's talk a little bit about the Victorians. Because if there's one thing that area perfected, it was turning human emotion into a marketable aesthetic.

17:19 When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria wore black for the remaining 40 years of her life. This wasn't just personal grief, it set the standard. Victorian morning became an elaborate codified performance with strict rules. 1st morning lasted one to two years. Full black. No jewelry except jet, which is fossilized wood by the way. No social events the 2nd morning for several months. You could add a little Gray or lavender. How generous. Then half mourning for several more months later, finally some purple or white.

17:55 Still no joy though. No joy. You can't have any joy. And it wasn't just clothing. There was mourning stationary with black borders, mourning jewelry made from the deceased. Hair. Yes, hair. Post mortem photography became wildly popular. Families would pose with the corpse, propping up dead children and draping them in flowers. The photos look like Victorian horror movies. Because that's essentially what they were. This wasn't about honoring the dead. It was about signaling grief. If you didn't warn publicly and elaborately, you were judged as heartless and proper, socially suspect.

18:30 Grief became a performance, and the performance had a dress code. Sound familiar? Well, today we don't wear black. For years, we post tributes. We change profile pictures to memorial frames. We write long emotional captions about people we barely knew because silence looks like indifference. Grief is still performed, but now it's hashtagged. After a celebrity dies, Twitter becomes a grief Olympics. Who can warn the hardest? Who loved them the most? Who can craft the most viral tribute? And if you don't post, if you process privately, you are cold, you're suspicious, you did not care enough.

19:14 The Victorians at least admitted it was theater. We pretend it's authentic while calculating engagement rings. Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try. What foot Binding and Victorian morning share and what they share with today's performative Wellness, beauty standards and emotional labor is this culture weaponizes conformity by making pain look like virtue. The Chinese mother who bound her daughter's feet was not cruel. She was actually protecting her. In a world where marriage was survival, crippling your child was an act of love.

19:53 The Victorian widow who wore black for a decade wasn't obsessed with death, She was following the rules. Deviate and you're outcast. And today, the teenager who develops an eating disorder because Instagram taught them their body is wrong isn't weak. They're adapting the person who works themselves and to burnout because hustle culture said rest is failure isn't lazy. They're compliant. We are always, always vulnerable to the idea that suffering is necessary as long as it's dressed up as tradition, beauty or progress.

20:29 And the most dangerous part? We do it to each other. We perpetuate it, we police it, we hand it down to the next generation and call it care. The Victorian mourning period is over. The foot binding has stopped. But the impulse, the drive to conform even when it hurts, to perform, even when it's hollow to suffer because the alternative is exile. That that's eternal. We've only just changed the costume now. Welcome to 2025, the era of crowd sourced stupidity. TikTok users claim they're losing up to 40 lbs in two months by drinking a blend of oats, water and lime juice.

21:21 The recipe varies, but most people blend 1 cup of water with half a cup of uncooked Old fashioned oats and a squeeze of lime juice. Some add cinnamon, because if you're going to drink raw oat sludge, you might as well make it festive. The name, of course, is a play on Ozempic, the actual prescription medication that's become the hottest weight loss drugs since amphetamines went out of style. Except Ozempic costs hundreds of dollars a month, requires a prescription, and actually works by mimicking A hormone that regulates blood sugar and appetite.

21:54 Oats and bake costs $3 and tastes like punishment. Here's what it actually does. Experts say the blend is safe and can help you feel fuller because, and this will shock you, eating fiber makes you feel full. That's it, guys. That's the hack. You're drinking soluble fiber mixed with water. Congratulations, you've reinvented oatmeal. Except worse. But here's the thing. It's viral. Millions of views, thousands of testimonials, people swearing it changed their lives. And why? Because we're so desperate for a shortcut, so exhausted by the grind of actual health, that we'll blend up raw oats and call it a miracle if someone on the Internet says so.

22:42 It's not that oats Empic is dangerous as such. It's that it's symbolic. It represents our absolute refusal to accept that there are no shortcuts, that weight loss requires sustained effort, that health is boring and incremental, that the answer is almost never one weird trick. We'd rather drink lime flavored regret than admit that.

23:09 But Ascempic isn't alone. It's part of the entire ecosystem of Tik Tok's Wellness trends that make radium toothpaste look well researched. Mouth taping. Placing tape over your lips at night to force yourself to breathe through your nose has gained momentum with claims of improved sleep, skin, mood, digestion, and even a sharper jawline. Let me repeat that. People are taping their mouths shut at night because they think it'll give them better cheekbones. Doctor's response is simple. Don't do it. The studies are small, the benefits modest, and the risks real.

23:46 If you have undiagnosed sleep apnea and you seal your mouth shut, you're not optimizing your sleep, genius. You're suffocating yourself in installments. But nuance doesn't go viral. Fear mongering and quick fixes do. And then there's the garlic in the nose trend. What the hell are you? Talking about. It's exactly what it sounds like. Yep, shoving raw garlic cloves up your nostrils to cure congestion. Does it work? Well, kind of. You see, garlic irritates your mucous membrane so much that your sinuses start producing more mucus to flesh it out.

24:25 You're not curing the congestion, you're actually creating it. It's like setting a small fire in your living room to prove you have a working smoke alarm. These aren't fringe trends. These are mainstream now. Millions of people trying them, influencers monetizing them, supplement companies pivoting to sell you the right oats or medical grade mouth tape, and the through line social desperation. Plus, virality outspaces science. We've outsourced medical advice to algorithms. We trust engagement metrics more than peer reviews.

25:02 If it has 10 million views, it must be true, right? Except virality doesn't understand biochemistry 00. And guess what's back? Vibration plates are back. These are the machines where you stand still and let the platform shake you at high frequency, supposedly burning fat and building muscle through the sheer power of vibration. They were popular in the early 2000s, by the way. They didn't work then, and guess what? They don't work now. But they're being rebranded as cutting edge fitness technology because we've collectively forgotten that we already fell for this scam 20 years ago.

25:41 The pitch is irresistible. Get fit without exercise. Burn calories while standing still results in just 10 minutes a day. It's basically an expensive massage chair that gaslights you. And people are buying them because the cultural obsession with shortcuts has reached religious fervor. We don't want health. We want the appearance of health with none of the effort. We want to be able to post gym selfies without actually sweating. We want transformation without sacrifice. Vibration plates promise exactly that.

26:16 And when they don't work, when you realize you've spent $800 to jiggle it in your living room, you don't blame the product, you blame yourself. Maybe I didn't use it right. Maybe I didn't vibrate hard enough. The scalm is self-sustaining. And finally, my personal favorite, the water based cooking trend. TikTok has discovered that you can cook food and water instead of oil. Revolutionary stuff, really. They're calling it a health hack, a game changer, a way to reduce calories and fat. You know what we used to call this soup?

26:54 Boiling. Literally how humans have cooked food for 10,000 years, but if you rebrand it as water based cooking and film it with good lighting, suddenly it's a trend. Suddenly it's innovative. Next week Gen. Z will discover that you can use heat to make food warmer and call it thermal nutrition optimization. Years later a doctor will tell me that I have an IQ of 48 and I'm what some people call mentally retarded. This is what happens when social media platforms reward novelty over knowledge. Ancient practices get repackaged as innovations because no one reads anymore.

27:36 History doesn't exist if it wasn't on TikTok. And look, I'm not saying these trends are all harmful. Cooking with water is perfectly fine. Eating oats is maybe fine, maybe not. I don't know. There's a new trend going crazy about that. But the mentality behind them, it is the idea that every solution must be new, must be viral, must be discovered by someone with a ring light, instead of learnt from tradition. That's the problem. We've become so addicted to the appearance of innovation and we've lost the ability to recognize wisdom.

28:16 So if you're feeling a little deflated right now, I get it. We just spent the last half hour cataloguing humanity's greatest hits of confident idiocy, radioactive chocolate, brain scrambling, ice picks, feet crushed in the name of beauty, and, oh, sludge marketed as medicine. But here's the thing. Being wrong is part of being human. Every single generation looks back at the one before it and thinks, how could they have been so damn stupid? And every single generation is simultaneously doing something equally stupid that just can't be seen yet.

28:55 You see, the alternative is that the world where no one tries anything, where no one experiments, where everyone just plays it safe because they might look dumb in retrospect. Well, that world doesn't innovate. It doesn't grow. It doesn't discover penicillin or build the Internet or figure out that washing your hands between surgeries might be a good idea. Yeah, we did try radium toothpaste, but we also split the atom and cure diseases and sent humans to the moon. Or maybe. Or maybe not. Yeah. Anyway, we're currently drinking Odsempic, but we're also sequencing genomes, building renewable energy infrastructure, and having conversations about mental health that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago.

29:38 The history of dumb ideas isn't a story about how stupid we are. It's a story about how brave we are. We keep trying, we keep experimenting. We keep betting on new ideas, even knowing that some of them will turn out to be catastrophically wrong. And when we do figure out we're wrong, when the radium starts glowing a little too literally, when the lead poison generation finally connects the dots, when we realize that maybe breaking children's feet wasn't the path to enlightenment, we course correct slowly, messily, with way too much resistance from people who get rich off the old system.

30:19 But we do it. That's the thing no one talks about. Progress isn't the absence of mistakes. It's what we do after we make them. So yeah, in 100 years, our grandkids will laugh at us. They'll mock our supplement cabinets and our bio hacking routines and our belief that hustle culture was anything other than self harm with a motivational quote. Let them laugh because they'll be making their own dumb mistakes. They'll have their own version of radium chocolate, and the cycle will continue. Because that's what humans do.

30:52 We stumble forward, falling on our faces, getting back up, trying again. We're not smart enough to avoid every trap, but we're resilient enough to survive most of them. So here's what I want you to take away from this. Stay curious. Question the things everyone says are true, especially the things you believe are true. The stuff you're most certain about. That's probably where you're most vulnerable to being wrong. Stay humble. You're living through history's next great comedy right now. You just don't know which part you're in yet.

31:21 So maybe hold your certainties a little more loosely. Maybe admit when you don't know. Maybe be willing to laugh at yourself before history does it for you. And stay kind, because everyone, everyone is doing their best with the information they have. The person drinking Ozempic isn't stupid. They're desperate and hopeful and trying to take control of something in a world that feels wildly out of control. And hey, if it plays with your mind, that could be good enough. We're all just trying to figure it out.

31:50 And sometimes we get it totally and gloriously and catastrophically wrong. But at least we're trying. At least we're here. At least we're still curious enough to blend oats with lime juice and see what happens. That's not stupidity, that's humanity. And honestly, I think that's kind of beautiful. We. Take control of. We rise. Thanks for listening. This has been history's dumbest ideas then and now. If this made you think, laugh, or question that supplement you just bought, please share it with someone who needs to hear it.

32:27 Until next time, stay curious, stay humble, and for the love of all that's holy, stay away from anything that glows in the dark. See you next week. Mom, somebody just followed me. Don't forget, don't like and subscribe. This is the most unusual practice. We think what we think, you know, with Tony.