Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
Speaker 1: There's other Josh who's basically fast becoming. He's gunning at
Speaker 1: Jerry's heels. I would say, Chuck. When't you agree? Well,
Speaker 1: I think at the very least he's the new Frank
Speaker 1: the chair. For sure. He may soon be the new bird,
Speaker 1: the bobbing bird. Oh that's right. Yeah. At any rate,
Speaker 1: we're glad Josh is here, and we just almost two
Speaker 1: inanimate objects. Exactly. We just ate up about a third
Speaker 1: of our time. So let's we're gonna have to remove
Speaker 1: the ending from this one. Okay, Yeah, this one is
Speaker 1: interesting because I read the original New York Times piece
Speaker 1: from nineteen o five or whatever, la la very different
Speaker 1: than the story we get here in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: So I can't wait to who knows, Let's just I'll
Speaker 1: just point out what the New York Times article said
Speaker 1: compared to what we have in front of us. Do
Speaker 1: it like a cranky I T guy when I say something,
Speaker 1: just be like wrong? Well, who knows? It is New
Speaker 1: York Times, But I don't know what There's andreds were
Speaker 1: like in nineteen five. I don't know either, right, Um,
Speaker 1: So there's this this article from How Stuff Works that
Speaker 1: we found um does a really good job of of
Speaker 1: of placing this in context in the world and saying
Speaker 1: that in Sanskrit, the word for coconut is kalpa vershka,
Speaker 1: which means tree which gives all that is necessary for living,
Speaker 1: which is a mouthful. I mean, that says a lot
Speaker 1: about what you're saying about the coconut. You're saying, you
Speaker 1: don't need anything else but this one tree. That's how
Speaker 1: great this tree is. Yeah, and that's also just a
Speaker 1: slightly fancier way than saying Webster's defines a little blank
Speaker 1: a little bit. It's it's definitely fancier, for sure. It's
Speaker 1: it's got like cursive everywhere. But the whole point is it,
Speaker 1: coconuts m m are pretty fun and good to eat
Speaker 1: and offer a decent amount of nutrition. It is it
Speaker 1: turns out that the sans Christs were saying is quite wrong,
Speaker 1: like it's not everything you need. You couldn't just subsist
Speaker 1: on coconuts. And there was actually a guy who was
Speaker 1: born in eighteen seventy five named August Engelhardt who who
Speaker 1: basically proved that inadvertently it wasn't his intention to prove
Speaker 1: that the Sanskrit term was wrong, but um, he actually
Speaker 1: took it to heart, um and and tried to live
Speaker 1: exclusively on coconuts because he believed that all you needed
Speaker 1: was coconuts and sunlight. And uh ended up living on
Speaker 1: I don't want to say deserted island, but certainly a
Speaker 1: sparsely populated island. Um living and dying there to to
Speaker 1: spoil the ending. Yeah, yeah, this is uh interesting mostly
Speaker 1: to me because it was when it happened. He was
Speaker 1: born in eighteen seventy Like, if this happened in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies would be like, sure, of course this happens
Speaker 1: all the time. But this guy was born in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy five in Germany, and then after college sort of
Speaker 1: became uh well there's a lot of debate and whether
Speaker 1: or not he was mentally ill, but regardless of that,
Speaker 1: he became very much into the Laban's Reform, which is
Speaker 1: life reform movement. Basically what you would think of these
Speaker 1: days is like a very sixties hippie American thing they
Speaker 1: were doing, I guess in Germany in the you know,
Speaker 1: early twentieth century. Yeah, I took it to be kind
Speaker 1: of like a prototype for Goop, for who for Goop,
Speaker 1: Gwyneth Paltrow's site. Oh good lord, Yeah, that's that's kind
Speaker 1: of I mean, like raw foods, alternative medicine. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of crossover between what this guy believed and
Speaker 1: what you could find on like some of the sites
Speaker 1: that Coop endorses and coop itself, especially if you take
Speaker 1: into account this book that he wrote, Um, it sounds
Speaker 1: a lot like the advice that Goop offers these days.
Speaker 1: You got sand Coop Coop so in he wrote a book,
Speaker 1: uh called a care Free Future colon the New Gospel Semicolon.
Speaker 1: That's rare glimpse into the depth and distance for the
Speaker 1: selection of mankind, comma comma for the reflection of all
Speaker 1: comma for consideration and stimulation. And he should have just
Speaker 1: put an exclamation point at the end, just over all spaces.
Speaker 1: He missed that Oxford comma after consideration though. But it
Speaker 1: was a kind of a cookie book. He talked about life,
Speaker 1: his lifestyle and what you know he believed his version
Speaker 1: of the Laban's reform was. And then he also wrote
Speaker 1: poems about coconuts. Yeah, like mother Coconut, The Coconut Spirit,
Speaker 1: How to Become a Coconut. Those were titles of some
Speaker 1: of the poems and tracks that he included in this book.
Speaker 1: And like, it's really hard to overstate just how much
Speaker 1: faith this guy placed in the coconut as the source
Speaker 1: of not just life but health. And um it was based.
Speaker 1: It was based on some somewhat unfounded ideas. So it
Speaker 1: tied in very much with an idea that he had
Speaker 1: that the sun was the source of all life in
Speaker 1: the universe, and that coconuts grew on coconut palms um
Speaker 1: toward the top, just like the brain in the human
Speaker 1: head does. And since the brain is closest to the sun,
Speaker 1: coconuts are closest to the sun. Ergo the coconut can
Speaker 1: care for the brain and everything else you need in life.
Speaker 1: And um, that was it. Yeah, that probably would have
Speaker 1: been the end of his story had he not had
Speaker 1: a substantial amount of money. Uh. I was about to
Speaker 1: say donated, but I guess he inherited it from a relative,
Speaker 1: so he had some cash. All of a sudden, he
Speaker 1: bought a hundred and eighty five acres of land on
Speaker 1: a tiny little island called kabakan Um off of Papa
Speaker 1: what is now known as Papua New Guinea, and he
Speaker 1: took a long books, got rid of most of his
Speaker 1: clothes and went out there and lived um by himself.
Speaker 1: Well not by himself because there uh, there are indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples in the area, but he was certainly the only
Speaker 1: white German there right. And his whole jam was that
Speaker 1: he he had either heard or figured out that that
Speaker 1: humans had evolved in the subtropics, between Tropic of Cancer
Speaker 1: and Tropic of Capricorn. And that's what we were basically
Speaker 1: evolved too, That's where we were evolved to be. So
Speaker 1: the idea of living in like a house and driving
Speaker 1: a car eventually, I don't know if cars were invented yet,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure this guy prefigured them. Um. The idea
Speaker 1: of just basically living in a boxing, cubicalized, stuffy life.
Speaker 1: It was and athetical of how we were designed by
Speaker 1: evolution or natural selection or even God if that's your bag, right,
Speaker 1: And so he moved to this island so that he
Speaker 1: could wander around naked, walking under the sun, eating coconuts,
Speaker 1: living how This guy genuinely believed humans were meant to live.
Speaker 1: And from what I can tell, he fully expected to
Speaker 1: basically be free of all disease and any kind of
Speaker 1: terrible condition living this way. But that's not the way
Speaker 1: that it ended up at all. No, because, first of all, coconuts,
Speaker 1: you cannot live on coconut alone. Um. They do have
Speaker 1: a lot of good stuff in there. They have good
Speaker 1: carbs and fat and stuff like that, but they lack
Speaker 1: a lot of vitamins, notably B twelve, B six A K,
Speaker 1: calcium um and protein. There's a little bit of protein,
Speaker 1: about three to three grams or so, uh, but that's
Speaker 1: that's not very much protein. So if you're gonna eat
Speaker 1: enough coconuts to supply your body, and he was about
Speaker 1: five ft eight, didn't weigh a lot and weighed increasingly
Speaker 1: less as time went on, Obviously he would have had
Speaker 1: to been eating, you know, between fourteen and eighteen coconuts
Speaker 1: a day. That's a lot of coconuts. But I mean,
Speaker 1: if that's all you're doing, if you're wandering around naked
Speaker 1: on an island, reading some books, you got time to
Speaker 1: eat fourteen to eighteen coconuts a day. So he could have,
Speaker 1: but it's not clear that he knew he needed to
Speaker 1: eat that amount. And it's also not clear that he
Speaker 1: would have responded to that information. So he didn't and
Speaker 1: he started to wither away, which, as you said, um,
Speaker 1: probably would have been the end of the story had
Speaker 1: this guy actually not managed to convince other people through
Speaker 1: his book and then through correspondence with them to come
Speaker 1: join them. And so people started to show up on
Speaker 1: this island. And we'll talk about what happened after that
Speaker 1: after this. Alright, So this this is where the New
Speaker 1: York Times story has diverged already. Okay, they wrote an
Speaker 1: article and everyone, if you don't know that The New
Speaker 1: York Times has pretty much every article they've ever written,
Speaker 1: uh scanned online. It's kind of great. Yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 1: So there was an article failure of a womanless Eden
Speaker 1: in the Pacific Dash, a strange story from the South seas.
Speaker 1: As the New York Times tells it, only two people
Speaker 1: joined the Sona Norton cult the Order of the Sun
Speaker 1: cult um. This article that we have says, and I'm
Speaker 1: inclined to go with ours, because you know, investigative journalism
Speaker 1: has gotten better since nineteen UM. But the New York
Speaker 1: Times set a boat showed up in the end that
Speaker 1: he was thought was going to be full of like
Speaker 1: twenty people and there was only two guys. Uh. The
Speaker 1: rest of the people got worried that the island was
Speaker 1: full of cannibals and decided not to show up. Which
Speaker 1: if that's wrong, it sounds like it was completely made
Speaker 1: up by the by the writer, because our thing says
Speaker 1: that about fifteen people showed up, uh and took their
Speaker 1: clothes off, and we're basically like, let's do this. Um.
Speaker 1: They did agree on the two two dudes though one
Speaker 1: one guy's name was Einrich Yukin's. He was four years old,
Speaker 1: he was a vegetarian, and he was away down with this, uh.
Speaker 1: And the other was very famous person actually um or
Speaker 1: at least medium famous in Germany at the time. Um,
Speaker 1: that's a lot of qualifiers. His name was Max Lutzow
Speaker 1: and he was a concert pianist and eventually conductor of
Speaker 1: the Lutzeu Orchestra in Berlin. Right. So, so Yukin's and
Speaker 1: lets ou basically showed up, from what I understand, and said,
Speaker 1: we're here, Um, we're very enthusiastic for this. Let's see
Speaker 1: some coconuts. They took their clothes off, they started to
Speaker 1: live this way. Um. But there were two big problems
Speaker 1: for for um Yukon's It was that he his body
Speaker 1: did not take to this diet despite from what I understand,
Speaker 1: being a vegetarian, if not a vegan ahead of time. Right, Still,
Speaker 1: the coconuts got him. Maybe had an allergy, maybe he
Speaker 1: got too much sign who knows, but he died. This
Speaker 1: article from how Stuff Works puts that he dropped dead
Speaker 1: within weeks of showing up and starting this this coconut subsistence.
Speaker 1: New York Times confirms that, okay, good, all right, so
Speaker 1: we've got a fact. We've we've unearthed the fact here too.
Speaker 1: It's double double sourced, um unless our house stuff Works
Speaker 1: article used that New York Times as a source. That's
Speaker 1: how facts get generated. And then the other guy loots
Speaker 1: out the conductor. He was doing fine and apparently he
Speaker 1: got along with um August angel Heart, the leader of
Speaker 1: this cult. But um he also they had they had
Speaker 1: varying tastes in music, and that actually created a bit
Speaker 1: of tension between the two. Yeah, apparently, let's out. I'm
Speaker 1: sorry Inglehart hated but Set. I think let's love but Set.
Speaker 1: And it says that lets brought his music collection. The
Speaker 1: only thing I can figure is that he brought over
Speaker 1: he was a violinist as well. That he brought a violin,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He could have probably one of those
Speaker 1: cranky gramophones maybe, you know, or maybe a bird with
Speaker 1: a beak like Flintstone style, or maybe a person dressed
Speaker 1: like a bird who could take direction really well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe he did bring records. Uh, I mean, Augus Inglehart
Speaker 1: brought books. He could certainly bring a crank up record player.
Speaker 1: So maybe that's what happened. But they they got the
Speaker 1: way The New York Times described it as they started
Speaker 1: getting into arguments about music. Uh. And because it was
Speaker 1: just the two of them, according to that article, it
Speaker 1: you know, it's gonna get a little crazy after a while.
Speaker 1: And looks I was like, I don't want to spend
Speaker 1: the night hit next to you tonight. Um And he
Speaker 1: applied for permission, supposedly with Inglehart, to go spend the
Speaker 1: night on a missionary boat that was nearby. Um at
Speaker 1: one of the other it was a bunch of islands around,
Speaker 1: and I guess Inglehart granted him this. He went on
Speaker 1: board this boat, he spent the night. He would refuse
Speaker 1: to eat any of the food that they had and
Speaker 1: apparently there was a storm that prevented him from getting
Speaker 1: back to his coconut paradise, and he died. Yes, he died.
Speaker 1: And if there were so, if two people showed up
Speaker 1: of the visitors died, but even if there were more
Speaker 1: in this house stuff works articles, right, because this guy
Speaker 1: carried this guy, August Engelhardt, he carried on even after
Speaker 1: these two deaths, um for more than a decade beyond
Speaker 1: that that New York Times articles. So maybe more people
Speaker 1: showed up afterward, and that accounts for the discrepancy. But
Speaker 1: as this how stuff Works article tells it, um, more
Speaker 1: people showed up, More people died from things like the hydration,
Speaker 1: heat stroke. Um. And then this one, this is tough
Speaker 1: to swallow. If it is true, then there is a
Speaker 1: creator God who does take pleasure in and and messing
Speaker 1: with us. But somebody died from being hit by a coconut.
Speaker 1: Somebody in the coconut worshiping cult died from being killed
Speaker 1: or died from a coconut injury. Which happens, Sure it does,
Speaker 1: it does, But I mean imagine traveling from Germany in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century early twentieth century, showing up to eat
Speaker 1: nothing but coconuts and then dying because of coconut hit
Speaker 1: you on the head. Pretty ironic. It is pretty ironic.
Speaker 1: So um August Engelhardt himself died too, but he hung
Speaker 1: on for a really long time, considering he had the
Speaker 1: true grit of somebody who really would have just eating
Speaker 1: eaten coconuts. From what I can tell, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: there are some pictures, some rare photos at the time
Speaker 1: from people who, uh, I guess we're nearby, and he
Speaker 1: he looked awful. He looked like he would expect someone
Speaker 1: to look. They describe him as a bearded bag of bones.
Speaker 1: There were lesions on his body. It was clear that
Speaker 1: he was suffering from severe malnutrition. As the New York
Speaker 1: Times tells it, he eventually was one of these missionary
Speaker 1: boats came and got him and literally wrestled him onto
Speaker 1: a boat, where he fought them physically as best he
Speaker 1: could while they tried to care for him. It's probably
Speaker 1: not not much now, until he jumped off the boat
Speaker 1: to swim back to the island where he died. According
Speaker 1: to our article and perhaps further you know, more accurate research,
Speaker 1: he he did go on that boat. He was kind
Speaker 1: of nurse back to semi health and then left again,
Speaker 1: went back to the island. Um survived until nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: and then because of World War One, he was captured
Speaker 1: as a prisoner of war. Released from camp when they
Speaker 1: realized he was mentally ill, They're like, wait, what is
Speaker 1: this about coconuts? You're saying uh? And he carried on
Speaker 1: apparently until nineteen nineteen, when he died at the age
Speaker 1: of forty four, weighing less than seventy pounds. So this
Speaker 1: guy did this for like maybe years ish, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean eighteen years. That's impressive. Man. Hats off to this
Speaker 1: guy for that level of commitment. So that's the story
Speaker 1: of August angle Heart. You can learn more about him
Speaker 1: on How Stuff Works. They wrote this article. I also
Speaker 1: want to just throw my two cents in and say
Speaker 1: I would put pretty decent money on the idea that
Speaker 1: angle Heart spent at least a significant amount of time
Speaker 1: married to a coconut on the island probably, so uh.
Speaker 1: Well with that, everyone, we bid you adieu from short Stuff.
Speaker 1: Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
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